


Zero-Six-Five.

by klubin (sidonay)



Series: Ark [2]
Category: Houdini & Doyle (TV)
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Body Horror, Gen, Mild Gore, Minor Violence, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-09
Updated: 2016-07-09
Packaged: 2018-07-22 13:19:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 49,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7440742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidonay/pseuds/klubin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A month after their ordeal on the <i>Ark Royal</i>, Houdini, Doyle, and Adelaide are sent out on a shuttle to find and investigate a ship that had been attacked by the alien sludge they had dealt with only once before—the same sludge that had also called for Doyle and told him that it was time to come “home”. </p><p>When they arrive at their destination, though, everything is soon revealed to be not as it had seemed and they find themselves in far more trouble than they expected.</p><p>Suddenly miles away from Earth and with very few friends, the three of them are now doing everything they can to get back home and get the answers they deserve from an agent that wants nothing more than to make sure that answers are exactly the last thing any of them will find.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 0-6-5

**Author's Note:**

> Man oh man, you guys. This happened! This really happened! This is the first time I’ve ever written a sequel before in my life. Normally I don’t even bother and, when I do try, it utterly fails. It’s my curse. But curses are, apparently, made to be broken. So here we are.
> 
> I had a good time working on this fic but, I will admit, I’m a little nervous because I feel like maybe you guys were expecting one type of plot but you wound up getting this instead. Hopefully this doesn’t completely disappoint.
> 
> Also I hope that the tags don't put too many of you off. I promise this isn't nearly as bad as they make it seem.
> 
> You definitely have to read [the first fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7300855) before you get into this one, otherwise nothing is going to make sense.

Being stuck on a cramped shuttle almost entirely against their will is bad enough, Houdini figures. Being stuck on that same shuttle with a handful of people who claimed to be engineers but were most likely very poorly disguised soldiers, a nervous agent from a nameless organization, and a man that Houdini kept wondering if he’d have to stop from trying to space himself after breakfast is an entirely different thing altogether.

The “man” that Houdini was referring to was, of course, Doyle, who had initially (and remarkably) agreed to go on this mission without too much argument, but Houdini had figured you either had two options when a sludgy alien lifeform that had taken over your body calls you from somewhere out in the stars and tells you to come home: You either turn your back and run for the hills or you run _towards_ it like playing a game of chicken with a train, hoping that, somehow, you’d win. Doyle had seemed to have chosen the latter, but the longer they bided their time on this shuttle, the more he had started to act as if he desperately regretted his decision.

 _Not that any of us ever really had a choice in the first place_ , Houdini mutters to himself for the thousandth time. After their ordeal on board the _Ark Royal_ —a situation that they hadn’t had a choice in dealing with either—they had been tricked into signing contracts with an ambiguous agency that had decided to use the information gleaned from Houdini and his friends’ five week long interrogation to confront the aliens and who realized far too late that they were in over their heads. They’d been told by that same agency that the three of them were the closest thing they had to experts and, any other time, that would have been just the sort of ego boost that Houdini needed but now, it was the last thing he had wanted to hear.

 

. . . .

 

Houdini had spent the first two days of their trip exploring every inch of the shuttle and the only places he could discover that would give him the most amount of privacy were his room and the bridge—a small section in the very front where Houdini expected to find the Captain or a pilot at the very least but was surprisingly abandoned, as if it had been added on merely because people exactly like him expected to find one there (shuttles of this size normally didn’t warrant the same sort of streamlined upgrades that science or military ships were built with that allowed for the shuttle to drive itself, but apparently this one was special).

There’s a chair in the center of the room and Houdini’s sitting in it now, surrounded by walls lined with computers, the displays flashing an abundance of text, numbers and diagrams that had to have made sense to someone, a curved window stretched out in front of him, nothing but the blackness of space beyond it. They’ve been stuck on board for almost a week so far and it was going to be at least another week and a half before they reach _Ragazzino_ , the science vessel that had been seemingly attacked by the very sludge it had gone looking for. They should have been there days ago but, despite all the current advancements in human technology over past hundred years or so, travelling thousands of miles in five minutes was still nothing more than an unreachable possibility.

Houdini wasn’t even sure it was worth making the trip. From the message that they had heard bits and pieces of, it was clear the sludge was already there. They’d seen the damage it had caused in only a matter of days. What would things look like after almost two weeks? Would there even be anything left?

He’s distracted from slipping back into his thoughts by the clanking of someone ascending the ladder behind him, and he spins his chair around to watch as Adelaide lifts the hatch in the floor, popping her head through the small hole to peer around. Houdini hadn’t been the only one to discover this area and use it as an escape and, by her hesitation and brief expression flickering across her face, it was clear that she had come up here hoping she’d have the place to herself. She hoists herself the rest of the way through the opening, though, and goes to sit in a chair positioned in front of one of the sections of screens on the wall. She stares at them for a moment, frowning, before turning to face the window.

“Kirby following you around like a puppy again?” Houdini asks and Adelaide sighs. Agent Kirby was the one who had been left in charge of preparing the three of them for this journey. He was also the one who had told them about the second part of the message that the other agent had conveniently left out, although that didn’t curry much favor with them as far as Houdini was concerned. They weren’t sure why he was there (and neither did Kirby, by the look on his face when Agent Holst had dropped a duffel bag in his hand and told him “good luck”) but he had taken a liking to Adelaide and decided that the best way to deal with that was to talk to her whenever humanly possible, which turned out to be almost always.

“No,” Adelaide says. “Not today. The meal dispenser is broken again. He’s trying to fix it.” The meal dispenser had already broken down five times since they started. Those machines _never_ worked but Terrastellar Enterprises—the company that made them—was a juggernaut so they continued being installed on ships and any complaints fell on deaf ears. Everyone on board had taken a turn at trying to repair the damn thing—Houdini had even caught one or two of the soldiers giving it a shot, propped up on their knees, elbow-deep in wires and machinery—but no matter what anybody did, it never seemed to last. “Have you spoken to Doyle yet?”

“I thought it was your turn.” Adelaide gives him an unamused look when he says it. “I know, I know. I’ll go drag him out of his room in a little bit. I can beat him at chess again. He loves that.” Doyle had chosen to confine himself to his quarters, only coming out to get food which he, most often, just left with instead of eating in the small dining area with the rest of the crew. He claimed he was using his time to write but nobody believed him. Houdini and Adelaide had allowed his behavior for four days before Houdini had decided that enough was enough and had walked into Doyle’s room, hauled him out of his bed and forced him to do something. At first ‘something’ was sitting in silence, looking mournfully out of a window but then Houdini had discovered that one of the soldiers ( _We’re not soldiers,_ one of them had complained when Houdini started saluting them whenever they crossed paths as a way of letting them know he knew their secret _._ ) had an old-school chess set—the board and pieces made of real wood—and she had been surprisingly agreeable when she caught Houdini walking off with it down the hall. She wasn’t supposed to know he had it, but it was remarkably difficult to hide a chess board down the front of his shirt and expect nobody to notice. Sleight of hand only really works when the thing you’re hiding actually _fits_ in your hand.

He hadn’t been sure if the game would even interest him. Three days had passed on the _Ark Royal_ and then, once they had returned home, they’d been separated for six weeks, only meeting again on the day they were told they were going back into space. It was a friendship thrust upon them out of necessity and it wasn’t until that very moment while he had been contemplating what it would take to get Doyle out of his room that Houdini had realized he didn’t know all that much about either of his companions.

Doyle had resisted but finally caved, most likely just to get Houdini to shut up. Houdini had let him win the first time—pretending not to know how to play—but Doyle had called him out on it, said that he wasn’t interested in being treated like a porcelain figurine and then, from that point on, Houdini had gone on to win every single match. Doyle hadn’t been too happy about that either but at least he was still showing up, even if Houdini was the one who had to make him show up in the first place. Adelaide did her best to get Doyle out of his room as well, but whatever they did to pass the time was completely unknown to Houdini. The last time he had seen them together, they were sitting across from one another in silence, both of them reading from tablets. At one point she had turned the one she was holding towards Doyle to show him something and he nodded. Houdini had asked her later what the hell was going on there but she told him to mind his own business.

“See anything interesting out there?” Adelaide asks, gesturing towards the window.

“Yeah,” Houdini says and she glances at him, eyebrows raised but then deflates, rolling her eyes when Houdini says: “Stars.”

 

. . . .

 

“The meal dispenser is broken again,” Houdini informs Doyle, moving a pawn a space forward on the board. Doyle is hunched forward, studying the pieces, trying to decipher what Houdini was attempting to do, but he glances up at him briefly and grunts softly before returning his attention to the board.

“I know,” Doyle says, picks up the piece he had disregarded only seconds before and moves it, placing it down carefully as if he thinks the board might explode if he’s too aggressive. They don’t speak for a few minutes, the only noise around them the ever-present hum of the shuttle’s engine and the clack of moving chess pieces. Doyle coughs into a closed fist and Houdini watches him, doesn’t realize he’s doing it until Doyle tells him to stop. “I’m fine,” he says. The alien’s message is constantly lurking in the back of Houdini’s head, the possible meaning of its request not lost on him. Both he and Adelaide tried to treat Doyle as normally as they could, but they couldn’t help it if, occasionally, they found themselves slightly on edge whenever Doyle so much as tripped and stubbed his toe. Doyle had picked up on their unspoken suspicions fairly quickly and Houdini figured it was a large contribution as to why Doyle refused so vehemently to stay for very long outside of his room in their company.

That, and his own deep-seated fear that they might be right.

“I know,” Houdini says, throwing Doyle’s earlier words back at him. “Checkmate,” he says suddenly a minute later and he sits back, smiling. Doyle glares at the board and then up at Houdini.

“You’re cheating,” he says and Houdini laughs.

“How?!”

“I don’t know,” Doyle admits, “But you must be somehow. It’s the only explanation as to why I keep losing.”

“The _only_ explanation? Really? The _only one_?”

“The only one that makes sense.”

“Me cheating makes more sense to you than the fact that you might just suck at chess?” Houdini asks.

“Yes.”

“You’re a sore loser.”

“I wouldn’t be such a sore loser if you let me win once in awhile.”

“Let you—” Houdini starts, shakes his head. “I did that! You yelled at me for it, remember?”

“Yes, well, if I had known it would be the last time I would taste victory, I wouldn’t have said anything,” Doyle says.

“Doyle lose again?” Adelaide asks, walking into the room holding a cup of tea. She stands at the end of the table, staring down at the board.

“Yes,” Houdini says. “And he’s whining about it.”

“We should play sometime,” Adelaide says, “I’m absolutely abysmal at chess. You’ll definitely win.”

“How ‘bout right now,” Houdini says, standing and gesturing towards his seat, inviting Adelaide to sit down. “Come on.” He reaches over, starts collecting the pieces and lining them up in their starting positions. “It’s not like we don’t have any time,” Houdini says when neither of them immediately move to follow through with his suggestion.

“I suppose we could,” Adelaide says, finally sits in the recently vacated chair, scooching it closer to the table. Doyle looks as if he’s going to complain then exhales slowly and scratches at his cheek.

“Fine,” he says and Houdini pulls up a chair to watch.

 

. . . .

 

“I’ve never won before!” Adelaide says gleefully, looks to Houdini as he cackles while Doyle puts his face in his hands and groans loudly.

 

. . . .

 

The clock on the computer in Houdini’s room tells him that it’s just past three in morning on Earth. Time of day doesn’t exactly matter that much where they are but he likes to know, tries to keep to as normal of a schedule as he can but here he is, lying on his side in bed on a hard mattress, staring at the wall, wide awake. They were now less than four days away from their destination and, at first, it had almost been easy to push where they were going and why into some corner of his mind, letting it fester quietly while he distracted himself. For a while, it was as if they were stuck in some sort of almost pleasant limbo. Miles away from Earth and many miles from the _Ragazzino_ , they could pretend that nothing was wrong.

Now they were so close that Houdini couldn’t ignore it any longer. The fact remained that they were stumbling blind into the empty void, like walking blindfolded and barefoot into a room and being unsure of whether the floor was lined with mouse-traps or landmines. Both would be painful to step on, but one of them hurt a hell of a lot more than the other.

 _There might not be anything left_ , Houdini thinks. They could show up to find nothing but floating debris, wander in to be confronted by the obsidian behemoth that the sludge travelled on. There could be nothing but more stars waiting for them, glittering, quietly asking “ _What did you expect to find here? It’s just us._ ”

He jumps when there’s a sudden knock on his door and he rolls over, waiting.

“It’s me,” Adelaide says, her voice slightly muffled. “Are you asleep?” For a brief moment, Houdini considers remaining silent, letting her think that he is so he can go back to thinking too much and worrying in peace but he changes his mind.

“No. I’m awake,” he says and Adelaide doesn’t respond. He thinks that maybe he’s waited too long, that she had already walked away but then she says:

“Something’s wrong with Doyle.”

 

. . . .

 

When Houdini was sixteen, a kid from his neighborhood he had spoken to only a few times before killed himself. One day he was there and the next he just wasn’t and he didn’t find out exactly what had happened until he read in the paper that he had jumped from the roof of his grandfather’s house while his grandfather was on a business trip. Houdini had remembered thinking back on it, back on their conversations, and wondered if there had been something he missed, if there were signs that he had ignored but nothing particularly glaring had lept out at him. They hadn’t been friends, not exactly, but he couldn’t help but wrestle with the idea that he might have been able to stop it, if only he had known it was coming.

“I went to get some coffee,” Adelaide explains during the short walk to Doyle’s room (she had brought her own tea with her when they left but had run out the day before; she wasn’t pleased with having to drink coffee, but she sucked it up because she needed the caffeine), “And I thought I’d see if he was up and wanted to join me. But when I got here...” They stop in front of his door and she lowers her voice just a bit. “Well, it’s locked.” That alone was enough to make Houdini tense. When they accepted that Doyle was planning on spending more time in his room then out of it, Adelaide had said that they would leave him alone as he wished but he wasn’t allowed to literally lock himself away. Doyle had agreed and, as far as either Adelaide or Houdini had known, he had followed through. “I knocked, asked if he was alright and he told me to ‘go away’. He didn’t sound right.”

Houdini takes a step forward, bangs his fist against the door.

“Come on, Doyle,” he says. “Open up.”

“Leave me alone,” comes from within the room and Adelaide is right; there’s something off in Doyle’s voice. A door opens behind them and they turn to see Agent Kirby standing in the doorway, watching them, concern furrowing his brow.

“Is everything okay?” He asks. He’s still wearing his suit, except his tie is gone and the sleeves of his crumpled white shirt are rolled to the elbows.

“Oh yeah,” Houdini says, his tone drenched in sarcasm, “Everything’s great. Nothing to see here, you can go back to bed.” When Kirby doesn’t move, though, Houdini walks over and slams Kirby’s own door in his face. Adelaide gives him a look. “Oh, don’t give me that face. Like you haven’t wanted to do that since we got here.” He bangs his fist on Doyle’s door again. “If you don’t open this door in the next ten seconds, I’m going to force it down.”

“How, exactly,” Adelaide asks quietly, “Are you going to do that?”

“I don’t know, maybe these doors aren’t as tough as they look.” Houdini moves to the other side of the narrow hallway and then throws his entire body against the metal door, bounces off of it and stumbles backwards, holding his sore shoulder. “Goddammit.” Adelaide asks him if he’s alright and he shakes it off. “I think I felt it move. I’m going to try again.” He readies himself for another lunge but, just as he’s bending his knees, the panel beside the door dings from red to green.

The inside of Doyle’s room is dark—the only light spilling in from the hallway—and Doyle is sitting on the edge of his bed staring at the opposite wall. They both invite themselves in and then close the door behind them, throwing themselves into nearly pitch black for a moment before Houdini manages to find the light switch and Doyle winces against the sudden brightness enveloping them. Houdini lowers it down to a soft orange glow as if the room was covered in candlelight and Adelaide crouches down in front of Doyle so she’s not standing over him, inspecting his face. His clothes and hair are disheveled and it’s only now that Houdini truly notices how tired he looks. He had never thought to ask him if he was getting any sleep because he had just assumed that he was. What else was he doing in here all those hours when he wasn’t with them? _Writing_ , Houdini had remembered Doyle saying.

He looks like he’s been drinking, although Houdini wasn’t sure where he could have possibly gotten the booze from, unless he managed to sneak it into the duffel bag the people who sent them up here provided him with before they left. Agent Holst had wanted them to leave as quickly as possible but had acquiesced to giving them a couple of hours to say goodbye to whomever they needed to say goodbye to; he could have bought a bottle (or two) for the trip. Houdini finds himself more annoyed that he hadn’t even offered to share more than anything else. He starts to search around the room.

“Are you alright?” Adelaide asks Doyle and it’s obvious he’s not; she’s just asking it to fill the silence.

“They cried,” Doyle says, his voice thick. “When I told them I was leaving, they cried. Their father goes missing for five weeks and three days and then he leaves them again. I couldn’t even tell them where I was going.” He exhales slowly. “They asked me when I was coming back and I couldn’t tell them that either.” A pause. “I don’t even know if I _will_ ,” he says softly.

“Of course you will,” Adelaide reassures him and then glances over her shoulder, briefly distracted when Houdini accidentally knocks something on the floor. “We all will.” Houdini thuds Doyle’s bag onto a small table, beginning to rifle through it, and Adelaide looks back at him again. “I’m sorry, but what _are_ you doing?”

“Looking for the alcohol he’s been very obviously drinking,” Houdini says.

“I haven’t been drinking,” Doyle insists and Houdini contorts his face at him as if to say: _Really? You’re going to try that?_ “Under the mattress.” Houdini closes an eye and points at him before going to crouch down by the bed, shoving his arm underneath the mattress, squirming it around until he manages to pull out ten tiny bottles, seven of them already empty. “I didn’t drink all of them right _now_ ,” Doyle says when both Adelaide and Houdini stare at him, the bottles balanced in Houdini’s hands.

“I suppose you’re going to say that this is why you kept losing to me at chess the whole time,” Houdini says.

“I’m sure that it contributed—”

“But it’s not,” Houdini says. “It’s because you suck.”

“Harry!” Adelaide admonishes. Houdini dumps the empty bottles on the floor, watches as they roll under the bed and then stuffs the three unopened ones into his pockets.

“Those are mine,” Doyle complains.

“You could have at least shared,” Houdini says, ignoring him. “I mean, I rarely drink. But still... Rude.” He stays in his position, he and Adelaide crouched in front of Doyle. “You uh… You really freaked out Adelaide. She thought you might have been— Well. She was very concerned.”

“Yes,” Adelaide says. “Not the one who tried to force down a metal door with his body. Just me.”

“I did it for you,” Houdini says.

“Of course,” she replies, subtly shaking her head at him.

“You thought I was going to kill myself,” Doyle says quietly, ending Houdini and Adelaide’s repartee and they stare at him carefully, almost surprised when they see him smile sadly. “You really thought I was…” He doesn’t finish and the other two regard each other for a brief moment.

“You have been fairly…” Adelaide begins to say, standing to sit beside Doyle.

“...Morose,” Houdini supplies for her, taking a seat on Doyle’s other side.

“Yes,” she says. “That. We don’t… well, we don’t know each other very well but we could tell you’ve been different. Morose, as Houdini put it. I’ve seen… Working for the police, in Security… You see it a lot more of it than you’d like, the people who are exceptionally sad.”

“I’m not sad,” Doyle says, clutches the mattress with both hands and leans slightly forward, staring at the floor. “I’m scared.”

“So am I,” Adelaide admits, glances behind Doyle’s back at Houdini, lifts her eyebrows at him, tilts her head slightly, encouraging him.

“Hell yeah, I’m terrified,” Houdini says, “Who wouldn’t be? I mean, look at us. Look at where we’re going. It’s crazy. And stupid. If we had any sense we’d hijack this shuttle and fly it straight home. But we’re not. We’re running right for this thing. So, okay, we’re all scared. And we’re crazy. And we’re stupid.” Houdini hesitates, frowns.

“What’s your point, exactly?” Doyle asks.

“I’m not sure,” Houdini says. “I forgot.”

“Maybe it was that we’re all in the same boat, literally and figuratively. You don’t have to push us away.”

“That probably wasn’t it but that was pretty good,” Houdini says and they lapse into a companionable silence. “Look just…” He awkwardly examines his cuticles, taps his thumb against the top of his thigh. “Just don’t pull something like that again, alright? You’ve already died once. I told you not to make a habit out of it.”

“I wasn’t going to do anything,” Doyle asserts.

“You know, for a guy who makes stuff up for a living,” Houdini says, “You’re not that good of a liar.”

 

. . . .

 

Houdini dreams about wading through a room full of sludge. It’s up to his waist and all he wants is to get to the other side, there’s a door there, but the more he walks forward, the further away it seems to get from him. He can feel the sludge seeping into his clothes and slowly, slowly it seems to be rising. It’s past his stomach, it’s up to his chest, his chin. He’s drowning in it.

He struggles, his arms flailing, and he touches something underneath the lake of oily mud, grabs hold of it, pulls at it and it rises to the surface, recoils when he sees that it’s Adelaide’s body floating in the muck, eyes wide open like the two-hundred-fifty people they had spaced on the _Royal_. He tries to swim away—go towards the door, just get to the door—and he finally does, pulls it open and Doyle’s there, reaching a hand towards him, pulls him out.

Houdini coughs, throws sludge up on the platform, can see the black ladder behind Doyle.

“Thank God you got me out of there,” Houdini gasps. “Adelaide is dead. I don’t know what—” He looks up when Doyle makes a strange noise and he’s leaking, the sludge oozing from his nose, his eyes, his ears. He moves quickly, unexpectedly, grabs a hand around Houdini’s throat, throws him against the closed door.

It’s not Doyle anymore. It leans into him, puts their faces too close, smiles with too many teeth.

“WE JUST WANTED. TO LEARN.” He speaks with the voice of the mangled AI and he squeezes, shakes Houdini. “MONSTER,” he says, let’s go of Houdini’s throat, grabs both hands on either side of his face and throws him off the platform.

 

. . . .

 

He wakes up with a start, lifts his head from where it had been resting heavily on his arms that were folded on Doyle’s mattress, his legs stiff from the way he had been sitting. He didn’t even remember falling asleep and he wipes nervous sweat from his forehead, looks over to see Doyle wide awake, watching him.

Doyle had tried to kick them out of his room but Houdini had refused to leave, stating that he wanted to make sure that Doyle didn’t have any other bottles stashed around that he was going to chug once he was left alone again. (“You don’t have to watch me,” Doyle had said. “I’m not,” Houdini had replied. “I’m just going to sit here for a minute.”)

“You were talking in your sleep,” Doyle says.

“Hope it wasn’t anything embarrassing,” Houdini says but Doyle doesn’t respond.

“Are they bad?” Doyle asks after a minute.

“They aren’t great,” Houdini says. “Do you—?”

“No,” Doyle tells him. “I don’t dream any more.”

 

. . . .

 

All three of them are on the bridge—a rarity but a welcome one, nonetheless—Houdini in his pilot’s seat, Adelaide in her chair by the wall, Doyle standing in the space between them, and they’re all staring out the large window. The moment of truth was creeping closer by the second and they had all agreed that they would stand there and watch it come. There’s nothing, nothing at all and then:

“There,” Adelaide breathes out, rising to her feet and pointing forward, but she doesn’t need to; they all see it. Just there, in the distance, is the shape of a hulking ship, floating dead quiet in the expansive darkness of space. The shuttle begins to slow down until it’s barely moving at all and then stops about two hundred feet away from its destination.

Houdini has seen science vessels in the news before and the _Ragazzino_ looks nothing like any of them: it’s practically a perfect rectangle, strange, sharp angles jutting out from the sides and there appear to be very few windows (and the ones that _are_ there are pitch black, not even a faint glimmer of light from within). It seems more like an oddly shaped package left on someone’s doorstep than a spaceship. The _Ragazzino_ is definitely an old ship. In elementary school, Houdini recalled the teacher taking a day to discuss the history of mankind’s travels into space and brought out a heavy picture book packed with expertly hand-drawn and painted spaceships, each page showing more and more advanced machines of flight. The book propped up on her legs, facing towards the class, she pointed at each one, seemed to know enough about them without having to read the blocky descriptions and Houdini remembers her stopping somewhere in the middle, looking down and showing them a box-shaped ship she explained was two times bigger than their school. Houdini had been impressed at the time but the impression must not have stuck because, now, he couldn’t recollect what she had said this sort of ship was used for other than that it most likely was _not_ an obsolete version of the sort of sleek science vessels he was used to seeing.

He gets up, hops down from the low pedestal that the chair was positioned on and moves closer to the glass, touches his hand to it but he doesn’t know what he’s expecting to feel. The stars don’t look any different as he studies them; no brief smudges of clear jelly across his vision, no feeling that something wasn’t quite right. The sludge and their ship were either long gone by now or else they were waiting somewhere else, watching them. Agent Holst had said that they managed to track down where the original message sent to the _Ark Royal_ had originated from but she hadn’t been clear how close the _Ragazzino_ had managed to get before being attacked, just that it was “on course” but it must have been near enough that the sludge had felt threatened. From what Houdini can tell, though, there’s nothing here. No ship-dotted sky, no planet. Not even an asteroid big enough to contain some kind of life. Just a broken ship.

Houdini has a sinking feeling that all they’re going to find are bones.

The ladder clanks, the hatch in the floor opens and Agent Kirby hoists himself through.

“I went to your rooms to tell you that we’re here but it I guess you already know,” he says, walks over to a station on the opposite side of the room where the other three stood and sits down, fingers moving over the panel in front of him. “ _Ragazzino_? This is _STS Achilles_. We’ve arrived at your location. Is anybody there?” Kirby pauses, waits, but there doesn’t seem to be a reply. He tries again but nothing comes through.

“Is it interference?” Adelaide asks. They all know what that means. Kirby shakes his head.

“No. Nobody’s answering.”

“So now what?” Houdini asks and Kirby turns sideways in his chair to look at him, shrugging slightly, opening his hands up towards him.

“It’s up to you three,” he says. “I’m just here to make sure things go smoothly and talk to the folks back home. This is your mission.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. From this point on, you guys are in charge,” Kirby says, spins back towards his computer, starts pushing buttons, and the three of them all stare at one another, talking without moving their mouths. Houdini gazes back out the window at the floating box. Ideally, he’d tell him that they were going back where they came from, that they never wanted to be involved, that they didn’t ask for this to be _their mission_. But he can’t shake the curiosity. They’re already here. He’d say it wouldn’t kill them to take a look but he wasn’t exactly sure.

As he’s thinking, the expansive door near the bottom of the _Ragazzino_ begins to open, revealing the cavernous docking bay inside, a toothless, open mouth yawning in their direction. Nobody was answering but somebody was definitely home.

“I guess we’re going in,” he says.

 

. . . .

 

The shuttle drifts lazily in through the open door as if it, too, saw no other option but to invite itself inside and it lands lightly in an empty room with metal walls and a high ceiling, dim lights flickering on along the floor, casting an eerie white glow, almost giving the illusion that they were suddenly somehow underwater. Kirby leads them to a small area just before the exit from the _Achilles_ where there’s already five of the soldiers waiting for them, four suits hung behind them in a row on one of the walls.

“What’s with the suits?” Houdini asks. They look similar to the one that they had fitted over Adelaide when she had found the bodies on the fifteenth floor of the _Ark Royal_ , except they were bright white instead of brown and the oxygen pack attached to the back was much smaller. Definitely an upgrade, at least.

“We don’t know what it’ll be like in there,” Kirby says.

“‘We’?” Houdini picks up on. “What’s ‘we’?”

“I’m coming with you.”

“This is our mission, right? That’s what you said?” Houdini asks and Kirby nods once. “Well, then I say you don’t. We don’t need you tagging along.”

“Sorry,” Kirby says, lifts one of the suits from it’s hook, already starting to put it on. “That’s non-negotiable. These guys can help you get dressed.” The soldiers are taking up the remaining suits and one begins to advance upon Houdini (the one he borrowed the chess set from) but he snatches it away from the hands that are holding it.

“I can dress myself,” he says, knowing full well in the back of his mind that he would need someone to seal it up once he had it on. The soldier backs away, her hands up, and then crosses her arms over her chest. She looks like she knows it too, but at least has the courtesy not to mention it. “Look,” he starts, pauses with the suit still around his ankles. “It’s a little crowded in here, alright? Do we really need the whole army in here right now?”

“I guess you’re right,” Kirby says and the room begins to empty, the female soldier the only one staying behind and she goes to adjust Kirby’s suit, sliding the helmet over his head and twisting it, locking it closed. Adelaide is nearly finished putting her own on and Houdini looks to Doyle but he’s still standing there, the suit at his feet, not looking at anything in particular.

“Everything okay?” Adelaide asks, notices it too, leans around Houdini, her helmet tucked under her arm.

“He’ll have to take the OmniTech Boot off,” the soldier says, as if that was the cause for his reluctance. “If there’s even a slight hole in the hull, the pressure could—”

“Alright! Thank you!” Houdini snaps at her and she frowns at him. “Could you two just give us a minute?” Kirby and the soldier glance at each other and Kirby looks as if he’s going to quarrel with them over it but she puts a hand on his helmet, turning him around and he stomps out of the room, the soldier following. “You’re not chickening out on us are, you?” Houdini asks Doyle.

“Something isn’t right here,” Doyle says eventually and Houdini snorts.

“ _Nothing_ is right here.”

“I mean with the ship itself,” Doyle clarifies. “That doesn’t look like a science vessel.”

“I know. I noticed the same thing,” Adelaide says.

“Yeah. I don’t even know why they bothered trying to sell that to us,” Houdini says, continues to pull on his suit and feels Adelaide come up behind him to seal it closed without him having to ask. His right arm is stiff, doesn’t move quite as well as he’d like, the cast just barely squeezing inside the fabric casing. With the glove over it, he highly doubted it’d be much use. Hopefully they wouldn’t have to wear these for very long. “Any ideas what it _actually_ is? I know I’ve seen it before but I can’t put my finger on it.”

“Same here,” Adelaide confirms, clicking the last bit closed on the back of Houdini’s suit, tugging on it to make sure it held. “I say we keep this to ourselves for the time being. Try to sort this out on our own.”

“Agreed,” Houdini says, peers at Doyle, who nods. “We should probably finish putting ourselves together or they’re going to start thinking that we’re planning a mutiny,” he says, referring to the fact that Doyle hadn’t even begun to put his suit on.

“She was right, you know,” Doyle says. “I can’t wear the suit’s boot over my OmniTech one. I’ll slow us all down. Perhaps I should stay—” He stops, lets out a slow breath.

“The sludge asked for you specifically,” Houdini reminds him and he watches as Doyle’s whole body tenses. “How do you think it’s going to feel if we walk in and you’re not there? I’d rather stay on it’s good side for as long as possible, thank you very much.”

“It’s good side?” Adelaide asks. “It has one of those?”

“Let’s hope so,” Houdini says. Doyle carefully unbuckles his OmniTech boot, pulling his foot out and drawing the legs of the suit over his own. He gingerly slides his foot into the bulky one that came with the suit and seems to make it as tight as he can. He pulls the rest of it on and Adelaide goes over to seal it up for him, Houdini picking up the helmet and lowering it over his head, reminiscent of when they had done this for Adelaide that short time ago. Houdini twists it closed and Doyle sighs, fogging up the glass.

“You guys ready?” Kirby asks, his dome-enclosed head peering into the room, doesn’t wait for an answer as he walks back in, feet hitting the ground hard as he approaches the door and pushes a button on a small panel. The door hisses open and they enter into the bowel of the beast.

 

. . . .

 

“So far so good,” Kirby says, his voice coming from inside Houdini’s helmet, and he’s holding a tablet that nobody had seen him bring along, reading something across the screen. They walk past the shuttle and towards a small door on the other side of the massive area and Houdini knows they must be making a lot of noise, their heavy boots clunking against the metal floors, but he can’t hear it. “Here we are,” Kirby says, opens the door and Houdini pushes him aside to be the first one through, out into a wide hallway with slanted walls and a narrow ceiling. It seemed to lead to yet another door and he stops, looking around before marching forward. Just as he reaches to open the door himself, it bursts wide on its own and the group files out into an open space almost as enormous as the ship itself and, when he cranes his neck to peer upwards, he feels dizzy. There's no ceiling, unless he counts the one about a mile up that was the roof of the ship, the levels circling them, rooms looking out into the large area below like jail cells lining the walls of a prison.

What sticks out the most to him, though, is that the place hasn’t been torn apart. When he had awoken on the _Ark Royal_ , the insides looked as if a battle had occurred while he slept: debris, broken walls and doors, alarm blaring, the power gone, the ladder their only means of movement through the floors. While it was dim inside the _Ragazzino_ , that and the missing people seemed to be the only problem. No sludge puddled on the floors or dripped from exposed pipes. Bodies weren’t pinned to the walls. It’s as if the owners had simply parked their car in a vacant lot and all gone out to dinner.

“The air is breathable,” Kirby says. “Although I’m not sure if we should—” He stops mid-sentence when he notices that the other three are already in the process of removing their helmets. “—Take the suits off yet.”

“They’re not airborne,” Doyle explains. “If they were, all three of us would have been infected while on board the _Royal_.”

“What about contact,” Kirby asks, “If it gets on your skin?”

“I don’t know,” Doyle admits. “I was the only one to touch it and I was… well. It had already made its intrusion.”

“So, basically, if you find any,” Houdini says, “Don’t start finger-painting with it.”

“Right,” Kirby says.

“I say we start from the bottom, work our way up. See what we can find,” Adelaide suggests. “If the sludge really is here and has taken over the crew...”

“We know how to get rid of it if need be,” Doyle says.

“Put a hole in the ship,” Houdini says. “Let the vacuum of space do it’s job.”

“I’m sorry,” Kirby says, interrupting their banter, “But there could still be people here. If you let outside in you could kill them.”

“If the sludge got to them, they’re already as good as dead,” Houdini tells him as simply as he can manage. He still held on to the guilt of what they did, knew that they had been doing all two-hundred-fifty of those people the biggest favor they could, but it didn’t make it any easier to handle. The only comfort he had was that they were probably, in the end, better off letting space crush them quickly than being kept alive by a liquid alien sorting slowly through their brains. A comfort, yes, but only a small one. Kirby looks like he’s going to say something else when a deadpan but unsettlingly human voice interrupts him before he can even begin.

“You are here.” They all turn quickly to see a man in a jumpsuit standing somewhere near the center of the room. His limbs are held awkwardly, his back hunched slightly and they can’t see where he might have come from, unless he had been hiding, waiting for the right moment to show himself. Kirby takes a step forward but Houdini reaches out, holds him back. The man’s nose and eyes are leaking a thick, black oil, dripping down his chin. _He_ isn’t a _He_ anymore.

 _He_ is now an _It_.

“We’re here,” Adelaide confirms. “What do you want?”

“Already discussed,” it says, walking sloppily towards them, listing a little to the side. All this time in human bodies, Houdini thinks, and they still don’t know how to use them. None of them try to move away, mostly because there was nowhere for them to go. The door to the elevator would require walking past him and they didn’t know the layout well enough to find any hidden escape routes. They could go back the way they came but somebody had let them in. It wouldn’t be difficult to stop them from getting out.

“I wouldn’t exactly consider you telling us to come here a ‘discussion’,” Houdini says.

“I did not tell you all to come here,” the sludge says, pauses just a few feet in front of them, looks them over, forces it’s face into what it must assume is a smile when it sees Doyle, but drops it when he notices Kirby standing with them. “Who is this?”

“Daniel Kirby,” Kirby manages to stutter out, swallows nervously, clears his throat. It blinks at him, as if trying to decided if he is someone they recognize.

“I do not know you,” the sludge says.

“Well, no,” Kirby replies, laughs awkwardly.

“Is this your ship?” It asks.

“Not exactly,” Kirby says. “The people I work for, it’s their—”

“So you are responsible for invading our home?”

“Not me, personally,” Kirby corrects the sludge again. “Kind of me, I guess, if you look at it in a certain way. And I don’t really think it’s an invasion. It’s more of a—” 

“I have heard enough,” the sludge says, interrupting him, and then reaches over to break his neck. The sickening crack fills the room and Kirby’s body drops in an instant, landing in a heap on the floor. The sludge looks at them as if to say: _Well, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…_

Houdini’s ears start to ring and he feels hollow inside. Adelaide has a gloved hand over her mouth and Doyle is so still, his face so pale that, for a second, Houdini thinks he might have died as well.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Houdini says, quietly at first, repeats it again, louder this time. “You didn’t have to do that!” He yells it, lunges forward, knocks it down on it’s back and sits on his chest, pounding his face in with his bulky fists. He stops, grabs it by the collar and holds it there, the body’s face now nothing but bruises and blood, an eye already swelling shut. “You could have sent him back to our shuttle! You didn’t have to—” He stops, crawls off of it when the body starts convulsing, scrambles to his feet, the three of them standing closer together. The body rolls, slips to it’s side and a mass of sludge comes pour from it’s mouth, sits there on the dirty floor for a moment before bubbling and sliding towards them.

They move out of its way, watch as it makes its way to Kirby’s body, up to his head and then crawls in through every open hole it can find, pouring itself up his nose, into his mouth, through his ears, seeping into his eyes. Houdini’s stomach is churning and he swallows acid.

“Not dead yet,” says Kirby’s voice. “Incapacitated.”

“Get out of him,” Houdini growls through clenched teeth.

“Not ideal,” it says, Kirby’s body still lying on the ground. “We cannot effortlessly go from lifeform to lifeform. Weakens us each time. I am young. Twice is my limit. I leave, I will die.”

“So?” Houdini asks.

“I am not prepared to die,” Kirby’s voice says. There’s a cough behind them and they turn to see the man that Houdini had beaten up now struggling to stand and Doyle goes over to help him.

“What—? Who—?” He tries to talk but he’s having trouble, his mouth dripping blood and saliva.

“You broke his jaw,” Doyle tells Houdini. “This man—” He starts, realizes he has to speak to Kirby’s body and glances at it before looking away, somewhere in the distance. “He needs medical attention. I can take him back to our shuttle—”

“You,” the voice says. “You do not leave.”

“I’ll take him,” Adelaide says, moves over to cup a hand under the man’s elbow, preparing to lead him to the door. “I won’t be long.” They start to walk away, Adelaide speaking softly to the man who shakes his head, makes a strange gesture with his hand.

“So that’s it,” Houdini asks, “You’re just going to lie there this whole time?” _It would be so easy_ , a frightening, angry voice in the back of his head whispers, _to finish him off right now_. The voice sounds too much like someone Houdini had promised himself that he would never be, though, so he tunes it out the best that he can, locks it away somewhere he can no longer hear it. The same part had been the one to beat in the face of the body the sludge had been housed in and he curls his fist, flexes his fingers. It wasn’t something he was proud of and, no matter how deserving the sludge was of retaliation, he couldn’t let that become the way he solved everything. He had let it get the better of him of the _Ark Royal_ but now he had to do better. They were dealing with an alien that did not seem to understand true emotion and human complexities. It understood violence outside of self-preservation, although Houdini finds himself wondering if that was always true or if it had simply been what it had learned from them.

“No,” Kirby’s voice says and the body begins to stir, legs and arms being tested and then, slowly, it starts to move more, wobbly legs lifting a heavy frame. The head turns back into the proper position and Houdini doesn’t want to know how it’s able to hold it up, how it’s even able to move now that the body is most likely paralyzed from the neck down. There’s a lot about this that he doesn’t want to know. It tries to take a step forward, falters, nearly falls, stops. “Time,” it says. It needs time.

“You have a name? Something we can call you?” Houdini asks after a minute or two of observing the sludge attempt to gain control of its new limbs. He has to, can’t keep calling it ‘Kirby’, has to find a way to separate himself from this situation as much as he can so he doesn’t fall back into red-visioned aggression and referring to it as something else is a start. Houdini hadn’t particularly cared for the guy or the people he worked for, but it didn’t mean he wanted to watch him be murdered and it didn’t mean, either, that he could just brush it off and move on. He’s avoiding, too, he realizes their strange over-protectiveness of Doyle, refusing to let him out of it’s sight, seemingly _happy_ to see him there.

“We do not ‘name’ ourselves,” it says. “Unnecessary. But I am the sixth one created from my…” It hesitates, tries to come up with the correct word to apparently use to define where it came from but it can’t seem to find one, doesn’t complete the sentence, seems to assume that the other two would get the basic idea of what it was trying to say.

“Only the sixth? How many of you are there?” Doyle asks, finally speaking again after almost twenty minutes of not uttering a word.

“I am sixth. From where I came is one of two thousand before it and a hundred after.”

“So… Six, then,” Houdini says. “We’ll call you Six.”

“Six,” it repeats. “Six. My name.”

“Your name,” Houdini confirms. He wonders idly if this bit of sludge was the first of its kind to have one, or if they’ve been through a similar process with other species in the past, if there was another ‘Six’ somewhere amongst the rest of the muck. The door behind them opens and Adelaide walks back in, stops when she see’s Kirby’s body now standing and then reluctantly closes the gap between her and the rest of the group.

“Six,” it says to her and she looks confused, glances at Doyle and Houdini.

“It’s name,” Houdini tells her. “So, uh… Six,” he starts, clears his throat. “Want to tell us what happened here?” He’s avoiding the part, the more important issue of their message to Doyle. If he doesn’t mention it, then maybe they’ll forget. (He knows they won’t be that lucky, but it’s nice to pretend.)

“Invaded,” Six says. “Retaliated.”

“But there’s nothing out there,” Adelaide says, looks uncomfortable speaking to someone she just watched have their neck snapped.

“Not that you can see,” Six says. “Hidden.”

“Like the ship from before,” Adelaide says. “They’re all camouflaged.” Six tilts its head as if it doesn’t understand the word. “Hiding in plain sight.” It looks like it’s thinking. Houdini can’t tell if that made it easier for it to understand and Six moves the conversation along as if it’s embarrassed to admit that it still doesn’t quite get what she means.

“This is a ship?” Six asks, clumsily lifts an arm, trying to gesture to the space around them, like it had merely guessed before but hadn’t been sure it was right.

“Yeah,” Houdini says. “It’s a ship. Just like the other one.”

“Does not look like the other one. Different design…” Six says, swivels its head, seemingly appreciating the fact that humans had enough imagination to not only somehow make _themselves_ all look and feel different, but everything else around them as well. “We did not send for you,” he says abruptly, eyes Houdini and Adelaide. “Only you.” He looks to Doyle. Houdini doesn’t realize he’s taken a step forward, put himself between Six and Doyle, until he sees Six watching him curiously.

“What, you gonna snap our necks now, too?”

“No…” Six says slowly. “You are his…” It’s searching for a word. “Companions. But do not think we have forgotten.”

“Forgotten what?” Houdini asks.

“You killed us,” Six says. “Sent into space.”

“How many,” Doyle asks over Houdini’s shoulder. “How many of you died?”

“Thousands,” Six says. “We are not pleased to see you. But if we kill you in return, he is more unlikely to cooperate.”

“Who said he was ever going to cooperate in the first place?” Houdini shoots back at it.

“We called. You came.”

“We didn’t exactly have much of choice, unfortunately,” Houdini says. Six tilts its head again. It doesn’t get it.

“We were sent to see what was going on here, to get an explanation,” Adelaide says. “But we have no intention of leaving Doyle behind. He’s coming back with us.”

“As far as I’m concerned, we did exactly that. Mostly that. We know what happened here, at least. And now we’re leaving,” Houdini says, turns, doesn’t have to ask the others to follow, which they do with hesitation. Leaving Kirby’s broken body behind filled with sludge isn’t what he wants, but Houdini doesn’t want to continue this conversation either. They make it halfway to the door before they’re startled to a halt when Six bellows:

“HE DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU.”

“That’s pretty rich,” Houdini says, turning back to face it, “Coming from a guy whose entire species seems to do nothing but take things that don’t belong to them, all for the sake of ‘learning’.” This remark seems to throw Six off balance slightly because it doesn’t respond right away, instead clicks the mouth’s tongue against the back of it’s teeth, obviously trying to speak in its own language the best way it could with the body it was provided. Houdini turns back with the others, stops once more when Six talks to them again.

“We have learned. Learned from you. If you do not leave him with us, we will kill.”

“You did that already,” Houdini reminds it.

“There are other lifeforms on this ship. We have not joined with them. We will kill them. It is only four, but we will kill.”

“Four?” Adelaide asks and Houdini was so stuck on the fact that this sludge was using the threat of hurting others to get its way only because _he_ taught it that, that he hadn’t caught the mention of the surprisingly low number of crew members that were apparently on this ship as quickly as she did. Something this size—science vessel or not—should have been crawling with at least a hundred other people, especially if the agency had sent it out here to find where the sludge had originated from (or, at least, where it had reached out to them from which opened up a brand new set of questions, starting with how a message from all the way out here managed to ping the _Ark Royal_ hundreds of miles away). “Did you say there were only _four_ other people on board? Are you sure?”

“We can count,” Six says and, despite the monotony of its speech pattern, it almost sounds insulted.

“That’s not right,” Adelaide says what both Houdini and Doyle are thinking. “Why would you send a vessel this big on this sort of mission with only five crew members?”

“What are you saying?” Six asks, walks a few steps closer, seemingly bothered by the fact that its threats hadn’t appeared to phase them quite in the way it had been expecting.

“When you got on board,” Adelaide asks it, “Did any of the people say anything? Did you try to talk to them?”

“Hm.” Six clicks at them again, eyes shifting briefly up towards the ceiling.

“Did you learn any new words?” Doyle asks instead.

“Yes,” Six says after a moment. “Payload.” He pauses, thinks some more. “Do you know the meaning of the word ‘bomb’?”

“Oh god,” Doyle says and Houdini feels as if his heart has stopped. This ship is a floating box of explosives.

“Bomb?” Six tries again, looks to each of them.

“Yeah, uh,” Houdini tries to figure out how to put it in a way it might understand. “You ever seen a star sort of…” He cups his hands, interlocks his fingers and then pulls them back away from each other, makes a soft exploding noise with the corner of his mouth.

“Yes.”

“It’s kind of like that.” Houdini looks around at the size of the ship-shaped bomb that there were currently standing in. “The blast would be enormous. If there really is anything living out here, it’ll be torn apart.”

“Torn apart,” Six repeats. “No.”

“We have to get out of here,” Adelaide says, ignoring him. “We have no idea if it’s on a timer or not. For all we know it could be set to go off in thirty seconds and we’re still standing here.”

“Not gonna argue with that,” Houdini says, goes to finally open the door to head back into the shuttle and the three of them march down the hall, their helmets tucked under their arms and they don’t realize that Six had been following them until they’re all crowded around the door at the end of the long path leading to the loading dock where their shuttle waited patiently for their return. They’ll get on, back out, make a call. Somebody had to tell them something. Why would they send them all the way out here to check on a floating bomb that was attacked by the very things it had sent to destroy? It wasn’t to repair it, to report that everything was in place—unless that was why Kirby had really been here—because they hadn’t bothered to tell them that it was packed with explosives in the first place. The sludge asking for Doyle was unexpected but if everything was blown to bits, why did it matter? They didn’t have to do as it said.

Not that any of this sat well with Houdini. Spacing a couple hundred people who were already practically dead and having them take the sludge with them, beating up a sludge-filled body because the parasite inside had killed someone, discussing briefly about possibly spacing them again, but only if they had to… that was one thing. Wandering into a species’ turf strapped with explosives, aiming to destroy things that might not have had anything to do with what went down on the _Royal_ was something else completely.

He tries to open the door to the docking bay but finds that it won’t budge, the lock beeping at them. He bangs on it with a gloved fist, tells them on the other side that yeah, very funny, but they’re ready to leave now. The door remains sealed tightly shut.

“We can’t let you in,” says a voice in his ear suddenly and, by the looks on the faces of Adelaide, Doyle, and even Six, they were hearing it, too, the sound coming from the devices that came with the suits, tucked into their ears. It takes a moment for Houdini to recognize it because he’d only heard her speak a couple of times, but he realizes it’s the female soldier with the chess set.

“What do you mean you ‘can’t let us in’?” Doyle asks.

“If there’s a breech,” Adelaide says, “We have a suits. We can still make it back to the shuttle.”

“I’m afraid not,” the soldier says. “The shuttle is no longer docked on the _Ragazzino_.”

“What?” Adelaide exclaims. “Why?”

“The bomb will detonate in ten minutes,” she says.

“We can make it out of here in ten minutes,” Doyle tells her.

“That’s the thing,” the soldier says, “You’re not supposed to make it out.” She sounds sad. “Our orders were to deliver you to the payload and then leave.”

“Why?” Houdini asks, “Why do it like this?” You want to get rid of people, there are certainly easier, less suspicious ways than sending them into space to be blown up inside a giant bomb.

“I don’t know,” the soldier says after a few seconds of agonizingly long silence. “I’m just following orders.” More silence. “I’m so sorry,” she says.

“Screw you,” Houdini says, and rips the device out of his ear. Adelaide and Doyle do the same and Six does as well, as if its only doing it because it saw them do the same but doesn’t know why. It’d almost be funny if they weren’t about to die.

“We have to— We have to get out of here,” Adelaide says and Doyle looks over towards Six.

“How did you get in here? On this ship. You must… You must have a smaller ship, like we did.”

“Yes,” Six says. “Small ship. Where would we go?” It’s a good question. If the blast is as big as expected, they’d have to travel a long distance in a short amount of time just to avoid the possible shockwaves. Houdini doesn’t even know what sort of ship sludge usually flew, although if the giant obsidian-looking ball they had seen a month ago was any indication, it was something that he wasn’t entirely sure a group of humans would be able to fit into particularly easily. He’s jammed himself into some pretty tight places before, but he isn’t sure about the other two.

“Somewhere else,” Houdini says finally. “Somewhere far away.”

“There’s four of us,” Adelaide says. “And the other four on—”

“No,” Six says, cutting her off. “Can only fit four. This body plus three others. There is enough space for many of my kind. Only four of yours.”

“So us. Take us,” Houdini says and Adelaide gives him a look tinged with disappointment. “I have a feeling they were dying with this ship anyway.” He pauses when her expression doesn’t change. “I don’t like it either, alright? But if I’m going to have to choose between them and us? I choose us. Besides, Six probably isn’t too keen on letting Doyle blow up, so you know he’s going. I’m not giving up my seats to a couple strangers. Not today.”

“We have to go,” Six urges. “Only three minutes and thirty seconds left.” They stare at him. “I can count.”

“Lead the way,” Houdini says and Six starts running in the opposite direction like a drunk man or a baby horse just learning to walk and they follow, the four of them bursting back into the belly of the ship and it keeps going, stumbles over its own feet and if this were any other time, Houdini would have left it behind but he stops, helps it up and they keep going. There’s a door hidden behind a blocky panel and it slides open easily when Six pulls at it. They have to crouch through the short hallway as they move through it and the ceiling keeps sinking lower and lower until they’re forced to crawl, gloves and knees scraping against the rough surface as they shuffle quickly forward. They finally reach a small, square hatch and Six pushes it open, tumbles into pitch black and, for a moment, Houdini thinks that it’s just launched itself out into space and that they were seconds away from being crushed until he realizes that he doesn’t see stars and then Doyle is pushing him from behind and he falls head-first onto a hard, black floor.

The other two are right behind him and he stands, head brushing the roof, looks around. The ship is sleeker, more similar to the shape of machines he’s seen back home. There’s only one level to it and, other than a few pieces sticking out from the walls that he assumes are supposed to be places to sit and a curved block in the front with a single seat facing where there should have been a window, the ship is empty. There’s light but he doesn’t know where it’s coming from, simply seeming to just _exist_ inside somehow. It takes a moment for Houdini’s lungs to realize that they can’t breath, searching for nonexistent oxygen and he starts to choke, Adelaide and Houdini struggling as well, hands to their throats as they gasp but then Six (who was beginning to wheeze as well) throws itself down in the main chair, starts waving its body’s hands over the block and breathable air swells into the small space.

“I forgot your lifeforms relied on oxygen,” Six says. “You should sit,” it informs them and they do, but there’s no seatbelts, nothing to hold on to. It turns out that they don’t need either of those; the ship runs smoothly, almost feeling as if they weren’t even moving at all.

“How can you see where you’re going?” Adelaide asks.

“I know,” Six replies. “How far?” It wants to know how far away it should fly.

“Until you can’t see the big ship anymore,” Adelaide says.

“Going,” Six says. The ship lurches and Houdini can feel the speed as they move and it’s disconcerting, not being able to see where they’re going, where they are. Nobody says anything and, after what feels like hours but couldn’t have been longer than a minute and a half, the ship lurches again, stops. They don’t hear anything and it takes Houdini a second to remember that out here, in the vacuum of space, they wouldn’t. Six moves it’s hand, touches the wall, and a piece of the ship seems to break away, revealing a clear, jagged bit of glass just big enough for them to peer through. They look just in time to catch the tail end of the explosion, stars glittering and winking as a compact burst of fire is quickly puffed out, and Houdini can almost see the shockwaves rippling through the sky.

At first he thinks it was a dud, that they got the coordinates wrong, that they just happened to run into a few of them by accident but then the ship is filling with the static and clicks of a million screaming aliens and they shove their hands over their ears. Houdini watches as Six sits, its face emotionless as it listens. The sound ends eventually but not abruptly; the voices disappear slowly, a group at a time until there’s only one left—a slow, sorrowful humming and a drawn out click that keeps going for another thirty seconds before, finally, suddenly ceasing. Whatever the ship is made of rebuilds itself, reforms back over the window it had made and the outside world disappears.

“What was that?” Adelaide asks quietly.

“Death,” Six says. “The sound of us dying.” He pauses. “Monster.”

For the first time, Houdini doesn’t try to correct him.

 

. . . .

 

They float there, nobody speaking for awhile, Houdini and the other two grouped as far back into the tiny ship as they can, Six just sitting there almost peacefully, staring straight ahead. It hadn’t said anything else after uttering the word ‘monster’, and the three of them hadn’t had a clue what they could possibly say. An apology, condolences, an explanation; all of those were options, but Houdini couldn’t forget who Six really was underneath that human skin: a little bit of sludge that had broken the neck of the person it was wearing just because it worked for the people who brought that ship into it’s space. It still seemed hell-bent on taking Doyle somewhere he definitely didn’t belong.

“We can’t stay out here forever,” Houdini says, keeping his voice down. “We have to go home.”

“Back to Earth?” Adelaide scoffs. “I have a feeling there are a few people down there who won’t be too keen on seeing us alive.”

“It’s not like we have anywhere else to go,” Houdini says. “Nobody’s coming for us. We can’t live our lives in space, cooped up in this tiny spacecraft.” Assuming they were that fortunate. Six had allowed them to come most likely because of combined sense of urgency with no time to argue and wanting Doyle alive but there’s only so long that the three of them can claim they were a full package. Simply being Doyle’s “companions” wasn’t going to work forever, and the murder of possibly thousands—if not millions—of it’s own kind seemed like the perfect time to get a little revenge using the closest humans possible.

“Although it is fascinating...” Doyle says, trails off, puts a hand to the wall and then removes it when the stone-like substance on the outside crumbles away to give him a window the size of his palm. “Remarkable…”

“Yeah. Astounding,” Houdini remarks, pretends like he doesn’t find it even a little bit interesting, watches as Doyle peers his face out the window, eyes narrowed and jumps back when the ship re-builds the outer surface again.

"Look, we have more friends on Earth than we do out here. Besides, I want some damn answers and we’re not going to get any of them out here.”

“I _would_ like to know why they tried to get rid of us,” Adelaide says. “And there has to be a good reason why they— Why they killed all those… all that sludge. Something else they didn’t bother to tell us.”

“Otherwise, this was nothing but senseless violence and I’m not sure I can live with that,” Doyle says. Houdini isn’t sure he can live with it _now_ but the idea that a few people back home might have ordered the deaths of not only a handful of their own, but a large collection of the first real sign of intelligent life just because they could… It didn’t surprise him as much as he expected, that was for sure, but it still made him pretty furious. He may not like this sludge very much—and he highly doubted they felt any affection for humans after today, although there most likely wasn’t much of it anyway after their experience on the _Ark Royal_ —but he wasn’t going to sit around and let his species kill things (possibly) just because they felt like it. The sludge could have tried to get to Earth again after the _Royal_. There had obviously been plenty of ships still wandering out there. It knew there was something down there now on that rock and there were ways to get at it. They could have come for the humans whenever they wanted, but they didn’t. Maybe they were waiting or maybe they hadn’t felt as if it was worth it. Now they’d never really know.

Houdini was already tired of having blood on his hands—secondhand or otherwise—and he was going to make Agent Holst be the one to scrub it off.

“That’s all well and good,” Adelaide is saying to Doyle and Houdini realizes he was so lost in thought he missed the beginning of their conversation, “But we’re not the ones flying this thing.” She had a point, Houdini knew that much. None of them could even begin to figure out how this ship worked—or if it would even respond to them ( _although_ , Houdini thinks, glances Doyle, _maybe it_ _would_ )—but the thing that it _did_ respond to wasn’t exactly their best friend.

“It doesn’t hurt to ask,” Houdini says and the two men stare at Adelaide, who gives them a look of utter dismay and then rolls her eyes, turning to face Six and take a few cautious steps towards where it was still seated.

“Six?” She asks, tries to get its attention and it clicks at her, which she figures was enough of an acknowledgement. “We need to get home. You’re the only way we can get there from here.”

“Home,” it says. “No.”

“We can’t stay here. My friends have—” Adelaide hesitates. “There are people we left behind that will be told we’re dead. And we need to know why someone tried to kill us. What’s really going on—”

“No,” Six repeats. _Not my problem_ , it seems to imply. “There are a few of us left, but they are much further away. He comes with me,” Six says, clearly referring to Doyle. “You leave.”

“Leave?” Adelaide asks. “Where would we go?” Six points forward, finger aiming. not at the front of the ship, but at the void of space past it. She takes a nervous step back, clears her throat, and Houdini can see her open her mouth to try and say something else, maybe attempt to convince it somehow, but she’s interrupted by Doyle.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Doyle says and Houdini feels like he knows what’s happening, what he’s going to offer. He doesn’t like it.

“A deal?” Six turns, tilts its head.

“Yes. A deal. You help us get safely home, help us get our answers—answers you deserve as well, I believe—and I will willingly leave with you. When it’s all done, you may have me. I will go with you.” Doyle says and Adelaide spins, gapes at him, eyes wide, her head shaking subtly.

“What?” Houdini lets out a laugh of disbelief. “No, Doyle. No. You can’t—”

“Answers,” Six says. It pauses, clicks as it thinks this over. _Revenge_ , the silence seems to say. “Yes. Deal.” It turns back to the block in front of it, moves its hands. “Sit now.” They do, Adelaide gazing at a spot on the floor, hands folded in her lap, Houdini staring at Doyle’s profile as he stares pointedly straight ahead.

The ship lurches, makes an almost dizzying turn, and starts to fly towards Earth.

 

. . . .

 

It wasn’t going to take nearly as long to get home in this ship as it did to get here in their shuttle (and wouldn’t that just kill the great minds back on Earth, to know that they weren’t the smartest lifeforms in the universe), but it was still going to be three days encased in a pocket-sized ship with nothing to do and no one to talk to but each other. Adelaide had told Six that they needed food and water (the latter at least) and it had knocked a piece of the ship off from where it sat, producing a small cubby-hole with a jug of what seemed to be real water and then took the section of the ship it had broken away and reduced it into tiny fragments.

“Water,” it had said. “From your predator.” It had meant, Houdini figured, the whale-shaped _Ark Royal_. At least they knew now where all the water in the pipes the sludge had packed itself into had disappeared to. “We found we like it. Provides no value. Good though.” It’s starting to speak better, more conversationally, but it’s speech pattern is still stilted, their body movements still awkward. “That,” it says, gestures to the little pieces. “Eat.”

“We can eat… the ship?” Adelaide had asked, picking up a sliver, inspecting it carefully.

“Well,” Houdini had said, “I’m always up for new experiences.” He had taken the piece from her hand and popped it directly into his mouth. It was salty, felt like sucking on charcoal, but it wasn’t bad. Surprisingly, it did seem to make him less hungry. Weird, but edible.

 

. . . .

 

Doyle has barely moved since he had made his deal with the sludge and Adelaide was currently sitting with him, the pair deep in a whispered conversation (the only kind you could hope to have if you wanted any privacy in such a small space). Houdini considers butting in but changes his mind and approaches Six instead, sitting down on the floor, arms draped over his knees as he stares up at it.

“Is he still in there?” Houdini asks after a couple minutes and Six turns its head slightly, glances at him questioningly. “The guy who’s neck you broke.” There’s still anger there, can feel it vibrating in his throat. “Does he know what’s going on? That you’re using his body like a puppet?”

“Puppet…?”

“Nevermind. The question still stands, though,” Houdini says and Six doesn’t respond right away, as if it’s trying to figure out the right string of human words to best answer him.

“No. He does not.”

“How does it work exactly, then? Do you just… shut him down? He’s still in there but he’s basically asleep? Like a coma.”

“Coma. Like Doyle’s wife,” Six says, and it’s the first time it’s actually used Doyle’s name. “Heard the word. Meaning?”

“Asleep but never waking up. Sometimes they wake up, after weeks or months or years. Most of the time they don’t.” If anybody had told Houdini years ago that he would be missing performances because he was stuck in an alien spacecraft, teaching the alien inside it what words like ‘coma’ meant, he would have laughed and asked if they were getting any adequate help. “How do you know about that? The sludge that was in Doyle died when he did.”

“Died,” Six says, appears to ignore Houdini calling it ‘sludge’ or, at least, has just decided to accept it. “Yes. You lifeforms and death.” It seems to realize it hadn’t actually answered Houdini’s question. “We share information. We learn. Learning does not benefit all if only one knows.”

“Right. You’re scientists. Just really funny-looking ones.”

“Scientists?”

“The first thing I’m going to get you when we get to Earth is a dictionary,” Houdini says. There’s a lull after that and Houdini strains to listen to the other two in the back, still carrying on, tries to decipher what they could be talking about by their body language, but it gets him nowhere. He looks back to Six, who was focused on the empty surface of the block it sat in front of, seemingly seeing things that didn’t appear to actually be there. “How do you fly this thing? I mean, when you’re not wearing somebody else,” Houdini asks and Six reaches to the same area that it had pulled the water from, opens a hatch to show a square space, a single piece carved out in the center like a fireman’s pole. “You sit in there?”

“Yes,” Six says, closing the tiny door. It had mentioned that this place was enough to fit ‘many’ of its kind and Houdini closes his eyes, tries to imagine the ship filled with bubbling, roiling sludge and he shudders. “Any more questions?” If it were human, Houdini feels as if it would almost sound annoyed.

“Why’d you leave that other body, go into this one?” Houdini asks. Six pauses its movements, frozen as if it doesn’t know how to answer or it doesn’t _want_ to.

“I panicked,” it says eventually, goes back to what it was doing. _I was beating it up,_ Houdini thinks. _It was scared._ More silence. Six does something and the ship gives him a soft _ding_ in reply.

“What do you want with Doyle?” Houdini asks finally. “Why is he so important to you?” Six taps a finger in no specific pattern, clicks once and stares ahead before glancing down to Houdini.

“None of your concern.” _Mind your own business_.

“He’s our friend,” Houdini says. “It absolutely is our concern.”

“I’m busy,” Six says instead of giving him an answer. “Go.” Houdini considers pressuring him, but the last thing he needs is to get into a fight with the guy who could decide the deal wasn’t worth it and easily launch both he and Adelaide into space.

 

. . . .

 

Houdini has no idea what time it is anymore, but he tries to sleep anyway, first propped up in a seat and then laying, stretched out on the floor wherever he could fit. He winds up back in his seat again, tries leaning against the wall but the outside of the ship apparently reacts to heat because as soon as he touches it pieces chip away and pressing himself against startlingly clear glass is disconcerting enough that even with his eyes shut, he can’t shake the feeling that he might fall out. Doyle has his palm pressed against a spot on the inside of the ship, keeping a permanent hole open for him to stare out of and he scratches his thumbnail against the glass.

“We’re gonna pull one over on him, right?” Houdini asks, his voice low and Doyle turns to gaze at him unhappily. “You say you’ll go with him but, once it’s all done, we go back on the deal. I don’t want to have to kill the guy but if we—”

“Houdini.” Doyle says his name as if trying to get him to shut up but Houdini ignores him.

“We know electricity works. All we have to do is find something small but powerful enough once we get back and we can—”

“Harry,” Doyle says and Houdini closes his mouth, finally stares at him and Doyle looks heartbroken. “It wouldn’t be right for me to not go through with it.”

“So you’re just going to give yourself up to this sludge,” Houdini says and Doyle sighs. “What about your kids? What about your wife?” _What about Adelaide_ , he doesn’t say. _What about me?_ Doyle looks away from him, stares back out at the small circle of endless stars and doesn’t reply.

 

. . . .

 

They’re a little over two-hundred miles from Earth (which they only know, thanks to Six’s almost clockwork-like updates) when Adelaide asks Six to stop the ship, which it reluctantly does and then here they were, floating in dead air. They had made it in the exact amount of days that Six had predicted and Houdini couldn’t wait to be back on solid ground, even if it meant that things wouldn’t necessarily be better. The water tasted stale and, while the pieces of the ship were remarkably filling, it got stuck in his teeth and left a thick coating on his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Besides, the suit was too warm and he didn’t want to guess how bad he was already starting to smell (not great, he figured, by the whiffs he got from both Doyle and Adelaide).

“What is it?” Doyle asks as Adelaide stands in the center of the ship, her hands on her hips.

“We can’t just go flying in on this ship. They keep track of what enters orbit and they _definitely_ keep track of what enters the atmosphere. At best, we’d be quarantined and arrested. Worst, we’d be shot down.” Houdini hadn’t even considered that. A strange, alien-looking spacecraft suddenly appearing in the skies? Even with human voices telling them it was alright, they knew there would be no trust, especially if they saw who was inside of it. Houdini had no idea who knew or cared about what really happened out in space, but he already was finding himself unwilling to trust anybody with a certain amount of authority.

“So what do we do, then?” Houdini questions. “Hitchhike?” Adelaide considers it for a moment before smiling slightly.

“Sort of,” she says, turns to Six. “Can you send messages from this thing?”

“Yes,” it tells her.

“Then I have someone I’d like you to call.”

 

. . . .

 

“Who is this?” A rough, male (and oddly familiar) voice says from a speaker somewhere within the ship, a bit of light shining from the block that Six hadn’t moved from since they climbed in there. “It’s not from Earth and I definitely don’t recognize this number from another vessel out here.”

“Captain Bradshaw, it’s Adelaide. Adelaide Stratton,” Adelaide says. Bradshaw. The captain of the _Pelican_ , the crew that had come to their rescue after they had been trapped on board the _Royal_. They had gotten them out of there, taken care of them the best that a cargo ship could, and carried them all the way back to Earth.

“Holy shit,” Bradshaw laughs. “What the hell are you doing back out here?”

“It’s a long story. But we need your help again.”

“Again? And who’s ‘we’?”

“Houdini and Doyle are here as well,” she says, purposefully forgetting to mention the fourth and newest member of their little group.

“You three got a taste for trouble and wanted to get into it again?” Bradshaw asks, says what he thinks Adelaide is going to repeat to him. “I know, I know: long story. Your signal’s pretty clear so you should be fairly close. We’ll come pick you up and you can tell me this long story when you guys get here. You have coordinates? What’re you floating in now?”

“We have coordinates,” Adelaide says, glances at Six who’s already moving its hands in strange circles over the dark surface in front of it. “What we’re floating in… Let’s just call it a ship and leave it at that.”

“Okay,” Bradshaw says after a few seconds of silence. “Coordinates are here. We’ll be there in half an hour.”

“What’re you two, best friends now?” Houdini asks after they close the connection between their ships.

“Are you jealous?” Adelaide asks.

“No,” Houdini answers a bit more defensively than he’d like, “I just think it’s weird that you seem to know his number right off the top of your head.”

“I have a good memory,” Adelaide says. ‘You should be grateful I do or we’d still be stuck out here.”

“Well,” Houdini says, clapping his hands together, changing the subject, “We’ve got half an hour to kill. Anybody want to gnaw on the ship one last time before we leave?” Adelaide rolls her eyes.

 

. . . .

 

The _Pelican_ scoops them up after forty-five minutes and Six lands the ship softly in the loading bay, Houdini barely feeling it when the bottom hits the metal runway and he’s about to ask how they get out—he can barely seem to remember how they got _in_ and where the door went after that, he was so concerned with _not blowing up_ that he hadn’t thought to pay attention—but then the outside of the ship is crumbling away and the glass parts to form a neat little hole just big enough to climb out of and they stumble into an expansive room packed with crates that you’d need heavy machinery just to move a couple inches, blinking in the harsh light.

There’s three figures waiting for them at the other end by a large door and, after Houdini’s eyes adjust, he can see it’s Captain Bradshaw, flanked just behind the elbows by a couple of unknown crew members (not that Houdini remembered all that much from the first time they were here; he had spent most of the ride home sleeping, had asked the the guy who had patched them up to give him a sedative just so he could close his eyes and not have to be plagued by worry that he would open them again and find out he had never really left the _Royal_ at all), which were doing a pretty terrible job at pretending that they weren’t there _just in case_.

Bradshaw walks over to meet them halfway and stops, arms crossed over his chest, lets out a low whistle when he sees their ship.

“Never seen a design like that before,” he says. “Is it Japanese?”

“Not even close,” Adelaide says and Houdini turns, realizes he’s only seen the thing from the inside and he almost whistles at it himself. It looks like the beak of a Kingfisher, black, long and pointed with slim wings pushed close to the sides and a tail that resembled a thick ice pick, the outside made of the same rocky, obsidian-like substance that the rounded, massive ship seemed to be made of as well. There’s a small pile on the floor where it had fragmented away to let them out and the glass door had already been covered as if it had never been there in the first place.

“Who’s your friend?” Bradshaw asks next, gestures to Six with his chin. Six is far too busy examining the area they just landed in to notice his suspicion or the way his eyes ask them if they hadn’t mentioned him because he was holding them against their will and he was about five seconds away from having his ship taken over.

“It’s theirs. The ship, I mean,” Adelaide says.

“Uh-huh. So where does a guy like that get an impressive piece of equipment like that? And how the heck did you three wind up stuck inside of it?”

“How about you let us take some showers and then we’ll tell you everything,” Houdini says and Bradshaw makes a face but, eventually, nods, leads them into the rest of the ship.

 

. . . .

 

“The showers are warm, not hot,” Bradshaw is telling them as they clank down a hallway, walking past rooms of crew members lounging, working on machine parts and just finding ways to pass the time in between jobs. It’s noisy—from both the _Pelican_ and it’s humming engine and the conversations and laughter from the people—but it’s a comforting sort of sound, especially after spending so much time surrounded by nothing but open spaces of silence. Even on the _Achilles_ with all those people jammed inside, it was too quiet and now Houdini knows why: everyone but the three of them knew what was coming and they were already being treated like they were slowly dying, as if the shuttle was nothing more than a hospice center. It had never been ‘their’ mission. It was just comforting lie told to the dying to get them to do what they wanted, so they never saw the end coming. “I figure you’ll want to get out of those spacesuits but all we have is Frontier Works jumpsuits, unless you can manage to sweet-talk some of my crew into lending you some clothes.” He glances at Doyle. “I’m guessing you don’t have an OmniTech under that boot. We can fix you up with another one if you still need it. People dropping heavy shit on their feet is probably our most common injury around here. Got a whole storage closet in the med room packed with ‘em. ”

Bradshaw takes them into an elevator that’s big enough to carry one of the crates in the area they left their ship and he pushes a button, waits, but nothing happens. He curses, slams his fist into the heavy panel, pushes the button again and they start to ascend.

“The bathroom and the dining hall are on the floor I’m taking you to now—the thirteenth. We aren’t scheduled for a pick-up on Earth for another two days and it would be suspicious if we showed up too early. The only reason we would is if we malfunctioned or someone got very badly hurt and it would to be pretty damn serious if it’s something we can’t fix ourselves. You guys are great, but I’m not putting anything—or anyone—out of commission just to get you home faster. The bunks are on the fourteenth floor. Should be able to scrounge up a few for you.” The elevator lurches suddenly to a stop, nearly knocks everyone but Bradshaw on the floor and the doors open with a creak, the four of them stepping out onto the hallway, Bradshaw staying behind. “When you’re ready, I’ll be in the dining hall.” He says it like if they don’t show up, he’ll come find him and they better be prepared to finally explain what the hell is going on.

 

. . . .

 

Bradshaw hadn’t been kidding about the showers but he may have oversold how truly ‘warm’ they actually were. Houdini was used to being able to stand under water so hot his skin would turn red and the steam would roll around the room so thick he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face but, for now, it was better than nothing at all. They had helped each other take off their suits and hung them in a row of doorless cubbies and, when they finish getting as clean as they can, they get back in the same clothes they had on underneath those same suits and they smell surprisingly less worse than they expected. Six hadn’t joined them in his own stall, choosing to stand awkwardly outside in the hall, looking at everything, and when they come back out they find it with it’s body’s hands pushed against the wall, fingernail digging at the material.

There is, indeed a collection of Frontier Works jumpsuits stored in a room just past the showers and they all slip them on over their old clothes (someone had left an OmniTech boot by the door, a note attached with Doyle’s name and a small, crooked smiley face) and they’re about to make the trip towards the dining hall when Houdini stops everybody, hands (hopefully) casually on his hips, so it looks like—to anyone who might wander by—that he and his friends were just having a simple discussion, checking in, and not trying to get their stories straight, which is exactly what he _wants_ to do.

“What’re we going to tell him?” Houdini asks and Adelaide looks confused.

“The truth, Harry.”

“All of it?”

“I think he deserves to know,” Doyle says. “He knows about the sludge, at the very least. I’m surprised Agent Holst hasn’t tried to kill him, too.”

“He must have thought we were delirious when we told him about it the first time. Probably didn’t believe a word we said,” Adelaide says. “I know _I_ wouldn’t. It’s highly likely he or his crew never mentioned it to anyone.”

“‘Sludge’,” Six says suddenly. “You keep using that. What is it?”

“You,” Houdini says. “It’s what you are.” Six repeats the word softly to itself, letting it move around in whatever it called it’s brain. “Well. Let’s go knock the socks off the Captain.”

 

. . . .

 

“Let me get this straight:” Bradshaw says, leaning forward slightly, his elbows balanced on the table, hands moving as he spoke, the other four sitting around him, steaming mugs of coffee placed in front of them in varying states of being finished. Houdini was on his second cup, Doyle only halfway through his first. Adelaide had managed to scrounge up an old bag of tea, which she claimed was better than no tea at all and someone had poured a cup of coffee for Six, who had tried a sip and then hacked it back up and frowned at it, poking it’s finger onto the surface and creating rings. Bradshaw had cleared out the dining hall—much to the chagrin of his crew—and sat the four of them down at a table in the corner and spread his hands, opening the floor for someone to start talking which, eventually, Adelaide did, Houdini jumping in occasionally to offer his opinion and for Doyle to latch onto something Houdini said, explaining how he hadn’t gotten it exactly right or, no, they didn’t know that _for sure_. “This agency sends you on a shuttle to this ship called the _Ragazzino_ which— You know what that means, don’t you?” He hesitates, looks to each of them but they stare back, confused, blinking. “Nevermind. They send you to a ship that’s gone out to find this… sludgy alien thing but it got attacked. You fly out to check things out, discover it’s a bomb and they want to kill you _and_ these aliens.”

“You got it so far,” Houdini says, takes a large sip from his mug.

“Right. And this guy,” Bradshaw says, points to Six, “Used to be a man named Daniel Kirby but is now… sludge… _inside_ of Daniel Kirby.” Adelaide had decided to leave out the part about Six breaking Kirby’s neck and taking over his body to tell them that he hadn’t actually _killed_ him, just paralyzed him, and Houdini hadn’t tried to fill in the blanks.

“That’s about it,” Houdini says, nods, and Bradshaw turns to look at Six, eyes narrowed as he watches him carefully, Six staring back at him, not blinking.

“You got a name?”

“Six.”

“Okay. Six. Sure.” Bradshaw holds out a hand in Six’s direction and Houdini wants to tell him to stop, to not make nice with the creature that showed no hesitation about getting rid of the body it now inhabited, the creature that was trying to take Doyle away for a reason it still hadn’t tried to explain, that had threatened to throw Houdini and Adelaide out into space because it didn’t need them around anymore. He doesn’t, though, and lets the friendly gesture proceed. Six glances at the hand, obviously doesn’t know what it’s supposed to do with it before slowly, clumsily, picking up its own body’s hand and putting it in the air, looking almost as confounded as an expressionless sludge creature stuffed inside a human body it isn’t quite sure how to control properly could look when Bradshaw moves his own hand closer to grab Six’s, shaking it briskly once, twice, three times before letting go. “Can’t say I’ve ever met an alien before. Guess I have now.”

“I have met your kind,” Six says. “Many times.” _Too many times_ , Houdini thinks.

“Seen one, seen ‘em all,” Bradshaw says and then turns back to the three humans. “I’d offer you food but our meal dispenser is on the fritz again, goddamn Terrastellar Enterprises. I told Pollard to fix it but I doubt he’s even gotten out of bed yet. I could probably scrounge up some—”

“You’re not gonna believe this!” They all jump when a voice calls out to them from the doorway and they simultaneously turn to see a random crew member standing there, a few others crowded around behind his back, out of breath as if they had ran there from wherever they had been before.

“If it’s that Patel beat you at pool again, I can guarantee that I definitely believe that,” Bradshaw says. “Now beat it, Gardner. I told you not to bother me for the next couple hours unless it was an emergency.” He looks away but Gardner clears his throat, his feet shifting against the metal floor impatiently and Bradshaw goes to stare at him again, glaring. “What?” Gardner doesn’t say anything right away, glances nervously at the other people sitting with his Captain. “Spit it out!”

“It’s all over the internet,” Gardner says, finally. “Harry Houdini is dead.”

 

. . . .

 

One of the people in Gardner’s group has a tablet with her and she brings it over to the table, all of them crowding around as they stare at the small screen, Houdini in the middle with nine other faces peering down around him. The signal isn’t great, the color washed-out and grainy and everyone has to practically hold their breath so they can hear it but there’s a smartly-dressed woman from an online news organization, hands folded on a bright white desk.

“—That Harry Houdini has died.” She was in the middle of a sentence and an old picture of Houdini from one of his performances flashes on the screen before returning to the solemn face of the reporter. “His manager discovered his body this morning in an abandoned warehouse, where Houdini appeared to have been secretly rehearsing a stunt for his next performance. One of the pieces of the contraption appears to have fallen on him, crushing him in what the police have called ‘nothing more than a tragic accident’. Harry Houdini, recently most notable for being only one of three survivors of the tragedy on the _Ark Royal_ a little more than a month ago was—”

Houdini reaches up with a trembling hand, changes to a different station.

“—Dead for almost three days before he was found—”

He changes it.

“—by his Manager, who says he doesn’t know how this could have happened, saying ‘If only I could have been there, maybe I could have done something’, also claiming that—”

Changes it again.

“—Attempts to reach out to Houdini’s family for comment were unsuccessful.” Houdini pushes the television away, puts his face in his hands and exhales loudly before turning, standing and pushing free from the small crowd. He walks briskly out into the empty hallway, moving in a tight circle before putting his palms on his thighs, bending his body as he tries to breathe. He wasn’t sure what part of this was worse: that they killed him in the most embarrassing, gruesome way he could have gone, that his manager must have been in on it somehow because, otherwise, there was no way he would so apparently easily believe how this happened, or the fact that his mother was now in her hotel room, dealing with the news that her favorite son was dead. _His mother_ , _oh God, his poor mother_ …

‘Harry.” It’s Doyle’s voice and, by his footsteps, it sounded as if he had come out here alone. “Are you—?”

“Alright?” Houdini provides for him, straightens his back to stare at him. “What the hell do you think?”

“Of course not.”

“I need to call her, Doyle. I need to— I need to send her a message or _something_. She can’t think I’m dead. She can’t. It’ll kill her if it hasn’t already.” He still can’t breathe right, puts a hand on his stomach and Doyle takes a step forward, looks like he’s going to touch him but decides against it.

“You need to try and calm down,” Doyle says. “Try to breathe.”

“I _am_ breathing.”

“Breathe like you’re not trying to make yourself pass out,” Doyle says and Houdini closes his eyes, inhales, exhales through his nose. When he opens them again his stomach is still in knots, his head won’t shut up, but the hallway at least feels slightly less claustrophobic. “If you call her, she might tell—”

“She won’t. Not if I tell her not to. Look, I don’t care if _God_ thinks I’m dead, Doyle, but my mother… she can’t. She can’t think I’m not alive anymore.”

“Alright,” Doyle says. “Alright. We’ll try to send her a message.” He disappears back into the dining hall. Houdini can hear him talking to someone and then the man that Bradshaw called Gardner walks out to join him.

“Mister Conan Doyle says you want to try and get a message to your mom. I think I can help you with that.” He gestures for Houdini to follow him and they move towards the elevator.

 

. . . .

 

Gardner leads Houdini to a little room just barely big enough for the both of them to stand in, the walls lined with junky and mis-matched electronics held together with rusty screws and old wires, a fold-out table weighed down by an ancient phone hooked up to a speaker and a keyboard with all the keys except a row of numbers, ‘enter’, ‘escape’ and ‘command’ popped off. A single light glows orange above their heads and the machines whirr, mini fans spinning, trying to cool themselves down.

“What is this?” Houdini asks.

“A very long distance phone,” Gardner says. “You can call almost anyone back on Earth, within reason. The connection’s a bit choppy but it’s better than nothing.”

“Where’d you find something like this?” Houdini asks next and Gardner shrugs.

“I built it. Frontier Works thought it didn’t make sense for us to go to Mars, come back and hang around on Earth for a week only to have to ship off again so we spend half of the year up here, stuck in limbo, and the other half shuttling back and forth between Earth and Mars. We all get along pretty well up here but we miss our families. Everything I used came from the construction on Mars, was going to be melted down and destroyed anyway. Things are changing so quickly back on Earth that brand new technology is already obsolete by the time Mars installs them. Everything is replaced practically every six months,” Gardner says, realizes he’s rambling and clears his throat. “Anyway. The company agreed to look the other way as long as we promised we weren’t building weapons up here,” he explains, gestures for Houdini to sit down in the chair and then points to the keyboard. “You press ‘command’ to get it started. Dial the number you want, hit ‘enter’. Depending on where you’re calling, it might take a few minutes to get through but it will eventually. Hit ‘escape’ when you’re done. That’s it.” He steps back. “Do you want me to—” Gardner throw his thumb over his shoulder, out towards the hall.

“No,” Houdini hears himself say. “You can stay.” He does exactly what Gardner said, dials his mother’s phone number, waits. There’s two minutes of silence and a faint static before he can hear the sound of her phone ringing but nobody answers. He hangs up, tries again and gets the same result. His heart beating faster, he tries a third time and then a fourth but still gets nothing. He was calling from a completely unknown number and who knew what it looked like on the screen at her end but, even then, he had hoped she would pick it up anyway, a mother desperately hoping the world had lied to her and that her son would call and say he was alright. He didn’t even get his lawyer or manager picking up to tell the person on the other end that they don’t know how he got this number but to leave the poor woman alone, for Christ’s sake.

“Is there someone else you can try?” Gardner asks and Houdini rubs at a spot on his head.

“The hotel,” he says. Maybe they could put him through to her room directly, let her know that— He hesitates, finger hovering over the numbers. He couldn’t. If they had any chance to stay a step or two ahead of the agency that tried to kill them, they had to let them keep believing they succeeded for as long as possible. He couldn’t let anybody else hear his voice, couldn’t tell them that it was Harry Houdini calling. “You have to do it,” Houdini says, stands, directs Gardner to sit in the chair he just vacated.

“Me?” Gardner questions, sliding into the room to drop down in the seat despite his incredulity.

“I’m supposed to be dead, remember?” Houdini reminds him. “Just… tell whoever picks up that you’re Leopold Weiss.”

“Who’s that?”

“One of my brothers,” Houdini says, gives Gardner the hotel number, watches him dial it.

“King’s Plaza Hotel, how may I help you?” A tired female voice asks after five minutes of them waiting to get through.

“Yes, hello,” Gardner says. “This is Leopold Weiss. I’ve been trying to get through to my mother but she’s not picking up her phone and I was hoping you might—”

“I’m sorry, who is this?”

“Leopold Weiss. I’m— I’m Harry Houdini’s brother. Like I said, I—”

“I’m sorry,” the woman repeats, talks over him. “But, given the current circumstances, I can’t just connect someone claiming—”

“Claiming?!” Gardner exclaims suddenly, making Houdini jump. “Miss, please.” He adds a tinge of distress to his voice as he continues. “I’ve been trying to get through for hours. My mother and…” Gardner glances at Houdini, who mouths his real name to him. “My mother and Ehrich were extremely close and after the news… I’m worried something might be terribly wrong. Please, I won’t be able to get there for hours. I just need to talk to her.” There’s a lengthy pause and, for a moment, Houdini thinks she had hung up on them but then she sighs, says:

“I probably shouldn’t—” She sighs again, lowers her voice as if someone was watching her. “Mister Weiss, your mother is no longer in our hotel.” Houdini opens his mouth to say something but then holds himself back.

“What? What do you mean?” Gardner asks.

“A woman came by in a car this morning, walked up to the front desk and flashed a badge. She said she was here to pick your mother up. Official business having to do with the passing of her son. I called up and soon after your mother and Mister Houdini’s manager came down with bags. The manager said they would be checking out as well, that they needed to go somewhere more private and then they left with the woman.”

“Did the woman give you a name?” Gardner asks after Houdini gestures for him to keep talking.

“No, she did not.” Houdini makes a circle around his face with his index finger and Gardner nods.

“What did she look like?”

“Mister Weiss, what’s going—”

“Just tell me!” Gardner insists. “What did the woman look like?”

“Um… She was tall. Blonde. Very nice suit. She—” Houdini interrupts, slams his finger down on the ‘escape’ button, ending the call and he turns away, goes to strike the nearest wall with his fist but stops just before it collides with it. He’d be no good to anybody with a sprained wrist on one arm and broken fingers on the other.

“That woman,” Gardner says. “You know who she is.”

“Yes,” Houdini says, his mouth dry, blood rushing in his ears. “She’s the woman who tried to kill us.”

 

. . . .

 

“She has my mother,” Houdini says, marching back into the dining hall, Gardner trailing behind, to find that the earlier crowd had been dispersed and it was just his friends, Six, and Bradshaw once again seated at their table but they all stand when Houdini enters, hands balled into white-knuckle fists at his sides.

“Who—” Doyle starts but Houdini cuts him off.

“Agent Holst,” Houdini says. “Agent Holst took her.”

“Oh, God,” Adelaide remarks breathlessly. “When?”

“This morning. She showed up at the hotel, flashed a badge and just— And my damn manager is in on it. He had her bags packed, checked her out… I’m going to kill him,” Houdini shouts, kicks a chair and everyone startles. Adelaide walks over to stand in front of him, puts her hands up, begins to say something but Houdini looks past her, points a finger at Bradshaw. “We need to get back to Earth _right now_.”

“No can do,” Bradshaw says. Houdini goes to lunge forward at him and Adelaide seems to consider attempting to stop him, to hold him back but changes her mind and steps aside. Houdini can tell that they’re bracing for him to start swinging but he doesn’t—he wants to, _he really wants to_ —and instead stands as much in Bradshaw’s face as he can, breathing quickly through his nose, fingers still curled into fists. To Bradshaw’s credit, he just crosses his arms over his chest and stares down at him calmly, but apologetically. “I get it. You’re scared. You’re pissed off. But if you still want to get home as under-the-radar as possible, I can’t show up at our landing zone even a _minute_ ahead of schedule. We go tearing down there, show up early with nothing wrong, with four extra passengers and weird-looking ship parked in our loading bay, how the hell do you think that’s gonna go? I’m doing you guys a favor because I like you but we are _not_ a taxi service.” After a few quiet seconds, Houdini slows his breathing, takes a step back. “Today’s almost over. You just have to make it through tomorrow.”

 _Easier said than done_ , Houdini thinks but, deep down, buried under the fear and anger and panic, he knows that Bradshaw is right.

“If she took your mother,” Doyle says suddenly, speaking softly with worry, “She might go for my children, too.”

“What the hell do you care,” Houdini says, turning to snap at him, “You’re abandoning them anyway.”

“Harry!” Adelaide admonishes but Houdini ignores her, storming out of the room before anybody could say anything else.

 

. . . .

 

Houdini doesn’t know where to go, finds himself roaming around the ship, takes the elevator a few floors down and eventually wanders into a small lounge area with a few beat-up chairs and a couch, the large window smudged and scratched, looking out towards Earth, blues, greens and white clouds swirled over it’s curved surface. It’s _right there_. She’s _right down there_ and all he can do is stare at his planet and count the minutes. One more day, Bradshaw had said. Just make it through tomorrow. He wasn’t sure he could.

What did Agent Holst want with her? He highly doubted she was going sit his mother down and tell him the truth. Was it to stop the media from trying to poke their noses in? His mother had been the one to answer the phone when Agent Holst had called to collect them all for their mission. Did she think she knew more than she let on? Did she suspect that Houdini had told her everything and now that he was supposedly dead, there was risk of her spilling secrets? Would she hide her somewhere, feed her lies, wait for things to blow over or something much, much worse? Houdini had siblings. They’d wonder where she went.

A wave of nausea surges in his stomach, pushing at his throat and he swallows, tries to think about something else.

They had killed him first. That, Houdini hadn’t expected. He had figured she’d put them all in a car together and crash it but she was knocking them off one at a time instead. He was more in the public eye, Houdini figures as he considers it more carefully. He had an audience that was used to seeing his face. Doyle they could say had sequestered himself somewhere to write and didn’t want to be bothered only to have something tragic happen to him eventually as well. But his kids… Doyle was so worried that they _might_ be taken that he hadn’t even considered that might already _have_ been. Then again, who would really believe a couple of kids claiming that their father was on a trip for some secret agency? Houdini didn’t even know what Doyle had and hadn’t told them other than that he was leaving again and didn’t know when he’d be back.

As far as Houdini knew, nobody knew who Adelaide was outside of what happened on the _Ark Royal_ and she was so secretive about her personal life, that there was no way of knowing if anybody out there was missing her. She’d mentioned a husband once, Houdini remembers, but never brought him up again after that.

 _“My friends have—”_ she had started to say when pleading for her and Houdini’s life while on Six’s ship and then corrected herself. It was a sad thought that Adelaide might not have anyone down there waiting for her to come home.

Houdini hears footsteps but doesn’t turn to see who it is. Adelaide walks up beside him, hands behind her back, and she glances at his profile before staring out the window as well.

“Bradshaw said there’s a gym with a punching bag on the same floor as the showers,” she says. “Or you could go find him and try to pick another fight. He said he’d let you get one free shot.”

“ _He’s_ the one who’d need the free shot,” Houdini says, even though he’s not entirely sure that was actually true.

“Of course,” Adelaide says and then lapses into silence.

“So what,” Houdini says, waits for a collection of crew members laughing and shouting at each other to pass by before continuing, “You all drew straws to see who would come find me and you lost?”

“You know that’s not true,” Adelaide says. “Not that Doyle was particularly keen on speaking to you, though, after what you said…”

“After what I said. The guy is serving himself up to that sludge on a silver platter and expects us to be fine with it. He’s so worried about Agent Holst taking them and he’s just… he’s just going to walk away anyway. I mean, he’ll save them and then disappear. Bye, Dad! Have fun with the aliens while we live with some relative and our mom is still in a coma! I’m sure we’re old enough to deal with this on our own!”

“I feel like there’s some personal bias creeping in here.”

“No, there isn’t,” Houdini answers a little too quickly. He knows it and it’s clear she does, too, but she doesn’t call him out on it, lets him lie to her.

“I don’t like it either,” Adelaide admits. “But, given the circumstances, if he hadn’t you and I would be floating in space, just a couple of dead bodies in useless suits.”

“Yeah, if he just said it to keep us alive, I’d be fine but… Addie. He means it. He’s going with them when this is all over. I saw it all over his stupid face when I talked to him on the ship before we got here. He’s been looking for a way out since we got on that shuttle and he found it.” Adelaide’s jaw tightens and and she lets out a quick puff of air through her nose, saying nothing, a look on her face as if she wanted to argue, to tell him he was wrong even though she knew for a fact that he wasn’t.

“We don’t even know what they want with him,” Adelaide says. “None of us has asked.”

“I tried,” Houdini tells her and Adelaide gives him an inquisitive look. “Six basically told me to mind my own business and I wasn’t exactly in a position to push it.” Houdini exhales slowly, changes the subject. “You did that on purpose, didn’t you? Talking to me about Doyle so I wouldn’t be thinking about— About other things.”

“Well, it worked, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, for five minutes.”

“You could go find Doyle yourself, yell at him for awhile. I’m sure that would help.”

“Sarcasm? Really? Maybe I _will_ go find him,” Houdini turns to leave, pauses. “Where is he, anyway?”

“Went to the bunks, I believe. Gardner stole Six, said there was something he wanted to show it and they wandered off.”

“That can’t be good,” Houdini says.

“Perhaps he’ll teach it how to play chess,” Adelaide says. “And then it can beat Doyle at it.” The both laugh but it doesn’t last long. “I am sorry about your mother.”

“She’s not dead.” He doesn’t know that, not for sure, but if he keeps telling himself that then he can keep believing that it’s absolutely true.

“I know. But still.”

“Yeah,” Houdini stares down at Earth, wondering if his mother is staring up back at him.

 

. . . .

 

The area with the bunks reminds him of the space where the Security Officer’s slept, where Adelaide found the suit on the _Ark Royal_ , except this place was massive, a double row of beds on shaky metal frames circling the room, a large space in the center where there were a few scattered chairs and a mess of personal belongings. Houdini can’t imagine how they separate everything from each other to find what’s theirs but maybe it doesn’t matter to them. They spend so much time together, trapped on board this cargo ship, maybe if someone is cold and finds a sweater on the floor, they just put it on.

The lights are low and there seems to only be one or two other people in there other than Doyle, who he can see laying on his back on a bottom bunk, his hands folded on his chest, staring intently at the mattress above him. One of those other people is snoring in a corner bunk, the other reading from a thin tablet and she acknowledges Houdini with a slight nod as he walks past and then goes quietly back to what she was doing. Houdini stands just at the corner of Doyle’s bed, waits for him to notice and, when he doesn’t (or, most likely, he just ignores him) Houdini reaches a foot out and nudges him in the leg. He still refuses to respond.

“I’m not a ghost,” Houdini says. “I know the news says I’m dead but they can be very misleading.”

“I’m not in the mood,” Doyle says quietly, as if he’s expecting any part of this conversation to be private.

“So what _are_ you in the mood for,” Houdini says, walks closer and leans his forehead against the metal frame that held up the top bed, staring down at Doyle.

“You are juvenile.”

“That wasn’t anywhere _close_ to what I was referring to. I think it says a lot about you that that’s where your mind went. And you call _me_ juvenile.”

“If this is your way of an apology,” Doyle says, “I do not accept it.”

“What would I be apologizing for exactly?” Houdini asks but Doyle doesn’t answer. “Seriously, I’d like to know. Because from where I’m standing, I’m still staring at a guy who’s decided to run off with some sludge.”

“The only reason I can surmise that they’d be so desperate to have me is that there is still a bit of sludge coursing through my veins, that it’s just been observing, waiting. If that’s true then I am not only a danger to myself, but to those around me I care about the most. My only options are to do as they say and gamble that they’ll let me go or die once again which I have been fighting against because, if I remember correctly, someone told me not to make a habit out of that and I try to keep my promises.” Houdini blinks at him, frowning. He _had_ considered the fact that there could be sludge still lingering inside of Doyle. It was, in fact, difficult to think of any other alternative when that very same sludge tries to call you to a home you’ve never been to before but hearing it come straight from Doyle’s mouth himself is still unsettling. The idea that there’s an alien still in there, lying dormant, studying everything it could about humans, having made it to their planet when the others could not ( _the sample in the pill bottle_ , Houdini recalls, but he has no idea what the people who had found it had done with it and _that_ was definitely something he was now terrified of as well) and was now being summoned home to reveal everything to whoever was left… Houdini shakes his head, clears his throat and then crouches down to be level with Doyle, rests his arms on his mattress.

“The person who told you that was pretty smart.”

“He has his moments,” Doyle says. “But don’t tell him I said that.”

“I won’t,” Houdini says and then turns around, sits heavily on the floor, his legs bent, arms hanging off his knees and he puts his head back against the edge of the mattress. Something brushes his hair but, when he glances at Doyle, his hands are still folded on his chest so he figures he must have imagined it.

 

. . . .

 

Houdini barely gets any sleep that night (or, what the clock on board the _Pelican_ tells him is night back on Earth) and the next day moves quite possibly the slowest any day in his life has ever gone. It turned out that Gardner had brought Six to everything non-functional or falling apart on the ship that still needed workin the hopes that it might be able to fix or improve upon them, but the only thing it had been able to repair was the meal dispenser. ( _Everyone can fix that_ , someone had mumbled to Houdini at dinner the night before when everyone else was talking about it impressively. _They’re just impressed because it’s an alien_.) Now, they spent the day sitting in the loading dock, where Gardner asked Six question after question about its ship and Six seemed surprisingly more than happy (if happy was something its species could even feel) to answer every single one.

Houdini had watched them for awhile, had listened in, but none of it made sense. Adelaide had been kidnapped by the few other women on board who had dragged her off somewhere on the tenth floor and Doyle was spending his hours sitting with the ship’s medic, teaching him better ways to treat certain reoccurring injuries amongst the crew that wasn’t just slapping some antibiotic gel and gauze on the problem and hoping that they’d sleep it off. Apparently there had been someone far more qualified in the position before him but an industrial accident left the guy with a missing leg and very little chance of being able to return to work. Their new guy—a recent medical school graduate who had joined up with the _Pelican_ as a ‘take that’ to his father—had taken up the position temporarily but nobody had been hired yet to replace him.

Houdini found himself alone, considered putting on a small show in the dining hall for anybody who might be interested but he couldn’t bring himself to go through with it, kept picturing his mother. _She never missed a show. This would be the first one._ He needed to do something that didn’t remind him of her and he wandered around the impressive ship, exploring empty rooms, storage areas, unoccupied offices stuffed with buzzing and humming computers, finding locked doors he could have picked if he had the right tools.

He’s somewhere on the seventeenth floor when he stumbles upon a narrow balcony surrounded by rickety handrails that were there to stop someone from falling. It looks across to a large window, down through the center of the ship and Houdini leans over the railing, watching ants almost ten stories below him moving and working and just passing the time until something else happens.

“Careful,” says a voice and Houdini startles, whips his head around to see Bradshaw sitting on the ground off to the side of the balcony, a paper-thin tablet in his lap, a pile of others by his left leg, waiting to be read. “The last time somebody tried leaning over that railing, it took five people to haul him back onto solid ground.” Had he been there the whole time? Houdini was usually more observant than that. He blames it on a busy head and lack of sleep. “I like to get work done up here. People can’t bother me if they can’t find me.”

“I could go,” Houdini says, gestures towards the hallway that lead to here but Bradshaw shakes his head, shrugs.

“It’s fine.” He’s silent for a moment. “What’s it like being dead?”

“I don’t know,” Houdini says. “You’ll have to ask Doyle that, not me.” More silence. Someone far below them howls with laughter at something and there’s a heavy crash of metal meeting metal. “What’s Mars like?” He’s heard the reports, watched with everyone else as the cameras from the construction drones and AIs transmitted images of red sand and rocks and swirling winds. It would take another fifteen years or so before humans would be able to move onto the colonies being built there. Watching it from their televisions was closest most of them would ever get.

“Cold,” Bradshaw says. “Beautiful. I’ve only ever seen it from a window. We’ve got a limited number of suits that can handle the weather and they go to the laborers, the machine operators. I just supervise. Not a view most people get to see, though, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.” There’s another pause and Houdini shifts on his feet, drums his fingers against the railing. Down below there’s another weighty clang, more laughter, and Houdini glances at Bradshaw, but he doesn’t seem particularly concerned. “Having trouble keeping busy?” Bradshaw asks.

“Yeah,” Houdini says, watches as Bradshaw stares at the work he had been trying to do and then stacks the tablets together, shoving them under his arm as he hoists himself to his feet.

“Come on,” he says, “Let’s find something to do.”

 

. . . .

 

“A ping pong table?” Houdini laughs when Bradshaw leads him up to where his office is, a wide room with hardly anything in it other than a desk, a few chairs and a large ping pong table with a frayed net and scratched-up paddles. The ball is dirty and creased from where a dent had been pushed back out to help keep its round form.

“What’s wrong with that?” Bradshaw asks.

“Nothing,” Houdini says. “I just didn’t think people still actually played this.” He’d had one when he was kid but, even then, the real thing was losing out to the virtual ones, packed away in a booth down at an arcade where you could play against world champs in different countries, adoring audiences screaming at you from the stands.

“You’re just too afraid you’re gonna lose,” Bradshaw says. “It’s alright to admit it.”

“I am _not_ — Fine. Let’s go, then,” Houdini says, picks up a paddle and Bradshaw serves. It bounces easily back and forth between them for a few seconds before Bradshaw suddenly strikes the ball hard and it goes sailing past Houdini’s head. “Who do you play with when you don’t have people like me to entertain?” He asks when he comes back after retrieving the ball from under a chair and then hitting it back to him.

“Not as many people as you’d think. We’re all friends around here but I’m still the Captain. I think they’re worried what’ll happen if they beat me.” He hits the ball aggressively but Houdini catches it this time, hits it back at him and swerves quickly out of his reach. They play in silence for a few minutes before Bradshaw speaks again. “About six years ago, I was up here making a run to Mars when I get a call from someone at Frontier Works.” The ball goes twirling past Houdini and Bradshaw waits for him to come back before continuing. “Told me my sister had gone missing.” He pauses and Houdini goes to say something but stops himself. “All I wanted to do was turn the ship back around and go home but I couldn’t. We had a schedule to keep and the company is damn strict when it comes to changing things. Besides, we’d be setting the Mars Project back at least a week if we didn’t show up on time. I’d probably lose my job and, well, my skill set isn’t particularly tuned for doing much else.”

Houdini hits the ball to Bradshaw, who lowers his paddle and catches it in his palm instead.

“How you’re feeling right now, about your mother…” Bradshaw says. “I get it.” He glances out the window behind his desk, rolling the ball around in his fingers.

“Your sister,” Houdini says after awhile, “Did they find her?”

“No,” Bradshaw says and then abruptly tosses the ball up, smacking it with a ridiculous amount of force and it goes whizzing past Houdini’s shoulder. “I win.”

“And you wonder why nobody plays with you,” Houdini says as he goes to find the ball again.

“I heard that,” Bradshaw says. “Rematch?”

“Sure,” Houdini says, and hits the ball purposely over Bradshaw’s head.

 

. . . .

 

Come dinner time, Houdini is sitting at a table with Adelaide, Doyle, and Six and he realizes it’s the first time he’s really seen any of them since this morning. They’re eating quietly, thoughtful, (most of them are; Six hasn’t touched the food it had been served other than to sniff at it even though Doyle had told it that it had to _try_ and pretend to like it, since the body it inhabited needed nutrition to keep going. Six had said it “wasn’t necessary” and left it at that) all of them knowing what tomorrow brought or, at least, the very vague idea of what their end goal exactly was: find Agent Holst, get some answers, save the day. The ‘how’ portion of it was the glaring neon sign humming over their heads that nobody had bothered to ask about. There were a lot of things, Houdini notices, that none of them were willing to discuss.

“Alright,” Bradshaw says, walking up to their table, leaning between Houdini and Adelaide, palms flat on the table’s surface. Gardner is hovering behind him, still holding his tray, as if they had been going somewhere else but Bradshaw was too impatient to wait for everyone to finish eating. “Here’s the deal.”

Bradshaw lays it all out for them: They landed an hour after breakfast. The crew liked to crowd around the loading bay door and then stream out into the Frontier Works hanger. Everyone knew the drill at this point and they were reliable enough that the company no longer did a headcount or made them sign in, although there were a couple of managers that still kept a close eye on them as they worked. He had whipped out a pad that showed a basic layout of the area, pointed to the inside of the building where they would land and then moved his finger to a small area behind where the ship was going to be, says there’s a door there that’s always unlocked.

“You keep your heads down,” Bradshaw says, “Blend in and then sneak off through there. Those guys I mentioned have a little work station, office-type room right here,” He points at the far end of the hanager. “Looks sort of like a trailer. They don’t go much further than that. Maybe up to here when we first arrive,” he says, points somewhere near the center of the massive space. “Then they just go drink coffee until we’re done.”

“Distract them with noise,” Houdini says, nodding. “It’s a classic way to pull something over on a group of people. Tell them to look at the pretty bird and they’re so distracted by the colors that you can rearrange the entire room and nobody would notice.”

“Right. And here,” Bradshaw says, slams down a set of car keys on their table. “There’s a parking lot here,” he points on the screen. “Those are for my car. Take it.”

“We can’t take your—” Adelaide starts to say but Bradshaw waves it off.

“What the hell do I need it for? It’s just gathering dust, anyway. Nobody should stop you. The lot is basically a junkyard to the company anyway.” It all sounded a heck of a lot easier than any of them expected, which meant that there was a catch somewhere in there and Houdini can see Bradshaw exhaling slowly, making a face. “There is one thing, though. Sort of the elephant in the room.” Houdini sees Six say the word ‘elephant’ to itself, glance at Gardner who shrugs a shoulder. _Don’t worry about it_ , he seems to say. “That ship we picked you up in… What the hell do you plan on doing with that exactly?” Houdini puts down the cup of water he had been sipping at and frowns. He’d completely forgot about that damn thing and, by the looks on Adelaide and Doyle’s faces, they had as well.

It wasn’t like they could stuff it in the trunk of the car they’d be borrowing, he highly doubted they’d be able to tow it along the back like a boat without raising any suspicion and they _definitely_ weren’t going to be able to fly it out of there any time soon unless they could slap a coat of paint on it overnight and claim it was a very small private jet if anybody tried to track them—which they would; ever since air and space travel became more prevalent and accessible to both corporations and the public alike, every single government pointed a hell of a lot more eyes up towards the sky. You couldn’t even toss a paper airplane up there anymore without some air force types knocking at your door at three in the morning, asking you if there was a camera on that thing and if you planned on sending it anywhere specific.

“It’ll have to stay here,” Doyle says.

“You want us to _keep_ it?” Bradshaw snorts. “Do you have any idea how much shit we’d get into if they find out we’re hiding a piece of alien technology up here? Besides, as soon as the loading dock door opens, they’ll see it. It’s not exactly a toy car.”

“No,” Six says.

“We don’t exactly have a choice,” Adelaide says to it.

“How will we leave your planet?” Six asks. _You won’t_ , Houdini wants to say.

“That’s not really the issue right now,” he says instead.

“The deal,” Six says. “Deal. Cannot leave if there is no ship to leave in.”

“How long will you be gone once you leave again?” Adelaide asks Bradshaw.

“We’re dropping off _and_ picking up this time. We’d be going straight to Mars and then, if we’re lucky, they’d load us up with garbage to bring back. That would take about a month. If we’re _unlucky_ they’ll have nothing for us. Could be two or three months before we’re back around these parts.”

“So we wait,” Six says. “I can wait.”

“We leave with your ship,” Bradshaw says, working it out out-loud. “We come back when we can, whenever that is. We pick your friend up, take him back into space, and leave from there.”

“Not just Six,” Doyle says. “Me as well.” Bradshaw stares at all of their faces, the somber look from Doyle, the anger from Houdini, Adelaide’s barely concealed sadness. He furrows his brow but nods.

“Okay. The two of you. Getting you _on_ without questions will be more difficult than sneaking you off, but that’ll be a problem for us in the future,” Bradshaw says. “Still doesn’t solve the problem of how we’re gonna hide this thing from our bosses.”

“Could we move the crates that are in there? Stack them up around the ship?” Adelaide asks but Bradshaw shakes his head ‘no’.

“We don’t have the equipment to lift ‘em on board. We’d need something a lot more clever than rearranging the room.”

Everyone turn to look at Houdini.

“Are you—” Houdini starts, sighs. “Alright. Hiding something that big is going to be entirely different than just doing something like this,” he says, picks up the car keys, hides them between his hands and then pulls them apart to show them that the keys were gone. Six looks genuinely surprised at this and then almost vaguely suspicious, as if humans have somehow been able to hide their powers from it and its kind this whole time, although Houdini still isn’t sure if he’s just projecting visible emotion onto an inexpressive face. The sludge certainly were capable of feeling things. Showing those feelings on the human faces of the bodies they inhabit, though, didn’t seem high on the list of priorities for them.

“I’m sure the great Harry Houdini isn’t actually telling us he can’t come up with something,” Adelaide says and Houdini puts up a hand, props himself up slightly on his elbows to lean over and get a better angle on the layout of the space the _Pelican_ would be settling down in the morning.

“If you happen to have a couple of big mirrors laying around somewhere and move the ship around a bit,” Houdini says, “We might be able to hide it in plain sight. It’d be right there and they’d never know it.”

“And if we _don’t_ just happen to have giant mirrors on board?” Bradshaw asks. Houdini rubs his hands over his face and then pulls them away. He grabs at a shaker of pepper and lays it down on the table and then takes the dishes from his tray, dumps them from Doyle’s and stands one of them up on either side of the shaker, has Adelaide hold it up, gives the second one to Gardner, who holds it on the other side. He stares at it, his chin balanced in his hands, reaches over to push the shaker closer to the wall Adelaide was holding.

“Not even _one_ mirror? Any sort of reflective surface?” Houdini asks, looks up at Bradshaw, who looks to Gardner. “If we put it right here,” Houdini points to what would be the nose of the ship. “And angle it _just right_ … As long as those guys don’t go past their trailer or anywhere over here…” He makes a curved gesture towards the right side of the loading bay. “It would work.”

“The only way we’re going to find something like that is if we build it ourselves,” Gardner says and Houdini looks over to him, briefly optimistic but then slouches when Gardner continues, “But unfortunately, we don’t. Not anymore. We had to cart reams of mylar film awhile back but I didn’t think to take any. Sort of wish I did now, though.”

“Give me a minute,” Houdini says, “I can probably come up with—”

“Take it apart,” Six says suddenly, interrupting him.

“Take _what_ apart?” Adelaide questions, points to the pepper shaker. “Your ship?”

“Yes,” Six says and Houdini glares at it.

“You didn’t bring this up before because…?”

“Not ideal,” Six says. “Not easy to put back together. Also you speak too fast. Could not immediately understandproblem or suggested solution.”

“We scatter the pieces then,” Doyle says. “They could go all over the ship, not just in the loading bay.”

Houdini sits back, crosses his arms over his chest. His mirror plan would have worked if they hadn’t been stuck on a cargo ship hauling only people and junk and didn’t have a little over twelve hours to make something work. Even then, he knew he could have figured _something_ out. When they needed something hidden, they had looked to him specifically. Being upstaged by an alien—by this one in particular and by a suggestion so stupidly simple—wasn’t particularly something he had planned for and now they were talking amongst themselves as if the earlier conversation had never even taken place at all.

“I’m going for a walk,” Houdini says and stands, walking out of the dining hall, not going anywhere in particular, just as long as it was far away from everybody else.

 

. . . .

 

Nobody sleeps that night, the loading bay brightly lit, busy with crew members taking apart Six’s ship and carting off the less bulky pieces to other areas of the ship, wings and ice-pick tail being carried through the door, down hallways and onto the elevator, black pieces crumbling onto the floor which were swept up by large brooms into small piles onto a large swathe of tarp. What’s left behind when they finish is the pointed-beak front of the ship which was too burdensome to lift and someone manages to find a sizable cloth stained with grime and oil, drapes it over the top, transforming it into just another piece of garbage.

It doesn’t take as long as expected but, by the time they finish, it’s only a few hours until morning and nobody figures its worth trying to get some rest and so the loading dock turns into a large get-together of the crew, people standing and talking, climbing on crates to sit high above the crowds. They throw things at each other, there’s mock arguments and posturing, laughter and someone starts to sing. Houdini shows up halfway through to watch from a corner and then eventually finds Doyle by some boxes standing underneath two pairs of swinging legs from a couple of crew members who had laid down on a crate to stare up at the ceiling.

“Finished sulking, then have you?” Doyle asks, his voice rising slightly to compete with the noise.

“I wasn’t sulking,” Houdini says and Doyle actually manages a smile.

“It was a fair idea,” Doyle says. “If we had the time and resources.”

“Of course it was a good idea. Besides,” Houdini says, “If I _was_ sulking—which I wasn’t—well…” He gestures to Doyle and then himself. “Pot. Kettle.” Doyle makes a face. “Please, you’ve been doing nothing _but_ sulk since we left more than two weeks ago.”

“I believe I had good cause for it.”

“I never said you didn’t.” They fall into a companionable silence. A group of people by the sheet covering the ship erupt into cheers and someone shouts about winning a bet ( _Where’s my money, you son-of-a-bitch!_ ). “Doyle?”

“Yes?”

“Tell me we’re going to find her and she’ll be alright.”

“Your mother?”

“Yeah.” Houdini’s still watching everyone but he can feel Doyle staring at him.

“You don’t believe it?” Doyle asks.

“I do,” Houdini says, “but say it anyway.”

“We’ll find her. She’ll be fine.” Doyle looks out to the crowd as well. “Everything will be fine.”

 

. . . .

 

They’re surrounded by a mass of exhausted, coffee-fueled, stale-smelling bodies, the four of them encircled by a majority of the crew of the _Pelican_. Captain Bradshaw stands in front of the crowd, the large loading bay doors behind him. In less than ten minutes the ship was going to touch down on land, lowering through the open roof of the hangar. All they had were the clothes they were wearing and a set of car keys. Houdini would like to think that he’s worked with a lot less to produce a heck of a lot more, but he’d be lying. Even the most subtle-seeming trick he pulled for an onlooker required hours or days of practice, trial and error, and the right set of circumstances leading up to that exact moment but now all they had was the hope that the people that got them here and the ones eventually waiting on the other side of the door were simply as predictable as they had been described.

Schedules, procedure, routine. That was all they had to rely on. After that, it was nothing but uncertainty with a set objective somewhere at the very end.

“Alright. Miller is about to land this beast so I’ll go over it one more time:” Bradshaw says. “We’ve got our machine operators in front. You’ll go right to your equipment, say your ‘good mornings’, do what you need to do, get them started and move them immediately towards the _Pelican_. We want our friends here to be able to pull out of the crowd and duck behind you. Hopefully, that should give them a chance to sneak off to the back door.” He continues talking, explaining something else and the first clump of people closest to him all murmur in agreement but Houdini is distracted by Gardner pushing through from the back to come up beside him, nudging him with his elbow.

“I have something for you,” Gardner says, slips something small but heavy into Houdini’s hand. It’s rectangular and made of slightly rusted metal, two shiny prongs sticking out from an inside that’s stuffed with wires. There’s a single button on the side and Houdini goes to try it without thinking but Gardner stops him. “It’s a stun gun. Well, not a gun exactly. It’s only got two charges and it’s not very powerful but it’ll do the job.”

“I thought you said the company didn’t care if you borrowed parts as long as you weren’t making weapons,” Houdini says and Gardner shrugs, which makes Houdini chuckle, his head shaking. He tucks it into a pocket of his jumpsuit, turns it so there’s no way he could accidentally sit on the button and send who knew how many volts of electricity through his own body. There’s a shift in the crowd and Adelaide bumps into him from his left, glances at him to smile nervously.

The _Pelican_ touches ground suddenly but unexpectedly stable, the motion enough to register contact but not enough to knock anybody over and the crew cheers, hands applauding and fists waving above heads.

“Miller’s fifteenth successful landing,” Gardner tells them when the noise dies down, shouting slightly to be heard over the whining and creaking of the loading bay doors opening, the bottom pulling down to create a ramp.

“Successful?” Doyle asks from behind Gardner. “Have there been _unsuccessful_ ones?”

“Why the hell do you think everyone was celebrating?” Gardner asks but neither of them have time respond because the crowd was beginning to surge forward. They wander out into a hangar that makes the _Pelican_ look like the size of the shuttle that had abandoned them, feet touching the concrete floor just in time to watch the retractable roof finish closing, the last bit of bright, grey sky disappearing to be replaced by the unnervingly bright lights swooping around the edges of the walls. There’s a row of equipment with hooks and platforms and enormous wheels, the once-new yellow paint now scratched and peeling. There’s a trailer-like building at the far end of the massive room and Houdini can see two men in dark suits exiting through a screen door, meandering over to the crowd and Bradshaw goes to meet them halfway.

Ten of the crew approach the equipment, climb up the sides like children on a playground and sit themselves on the cracked leather seats, starting the machines with roars and coughs, black smoke choking out of the exhaust pipes. They start to drive them towards the _Pelican_ , taking their time, yanking on slender gear shifts with groaning creaks and Houdini and the other three keep close, move slowly backwards, the crew creating a path and then filling in the gaps that were left behind in front of them. They slide between a crane and a pallet lifter, they keep close to the shadow casted by the ship and all Houdini wants to do is run—he can _see_ the door—but he doesn’t, keeps at a steady pace, casual. He’s holding his breath, waits for someone to shout out to them to stop, keeps holding it when he puts his hand down on the door handle, waits this time for it to be locked but it opens easily under his grip and then, just like that, they’re outside.

It’s a narrow alley, dying grass under their feet, wet from a rain that had long since passed, a chain-link fence—the top curled with a jungle of barbed wire—to the other side. They start to walk to the left, pausing to check their surroundings when they reach the very edge of the building. There are other buildings to their beside the one they’re hidden behind, a stretch of solid pavement ahead and then there, a couple hundred feet further was a fence-enclosed space packed with vehicles, a driveway that dips down a slope and, beyond that, freedom. There are very few trees—the property outside the fence bordered by high, neatly trimmed bushes—and the leaves on the ones that _are_ there—the trunks slender and gnarled—rustle with a warm breeze that smells almost sour like a mixture of an ocean and melted electronics.

There doesn’t appear to be anybody else around and Houdini exhales slowly, looks back at his friends and at Six before bending his legs slightly, facing forwards and leaning against the vinegary breeze.

“What are you doing?” Doyle asks but Houdini doesn’t answer; he just starts to run. His arms pumping at his sides, he hears the sound of three other pairs of feet slamming against the pavement: the awkward steps of Six trying to keep up in a body it doesn’t quite understand, the quick breaths of Adelaide as she catches up to Houdini, keeping pace, the harsh panting of Doyle trying not to give away how out-of-shape he really was as he moved. A scattering of birds bursts suddenly from one of the trees, a gull shouts at them from way above their heads, a crash bellows from the hangar they left.

There’s a door in the fence surrounding the lot and Houdini stops himself suddenly, pushing back against the momentum he had gathered, runs into it and freezes as the metal rattles vigorously under the impact but nobody comes out to investigate. He pulls on it, ready to move on to the next step but it doesn’t open. He shakes it, creates more noise, but there’s still nothing and he grabs at the padlock he only just notices, tugs on that, too, but it doesn’t yield. It’s old-school; not the type you’d need to hack to break into like Doyle’s door back on the shuttle, but the type where all you’d need is the right set of lockpicks and hours of practice under your belt—only one of which Houdini currently had. Houdini curses, pulls a fingers through his hair, looks to the others.

“You guys wouldn’t happen to have a full set of tools hidden under your jumpsuits, would you?” He asks.

“I must have left them back on the shuttle,” Doyle says, Adelaide frowns, shrugging one shoulder, and Six seems far more fascinated by the gull now laughing at them as it flies in circles above them. It’d take longer than they probably had to dig a hole to try and slip under, so their only option was to climb _over_ , which meant somehow pulling themselves over the coils of barbed wire without ending up like a flailing fish tangled in a net.

“Someone’s going to have to climb this,” Houdini says, curls his fingers between the chain-link, shakes the fence again, tests its stability and Adelaide grabs his arm, holds him still.

“Are you insane? How, exactly? Float over it? You’ll be ripped to shreds. There has to be another way,” she says, lets him go and starts to wander away, walking the perimeter, examining the blockade and Houdini tries to keep one eye on her and another on their surroundings. Eventually she returns, looking disappointed. “We’ll dig, then. The soil is wet. It’ll be easy to move it around.”

“Dig with what?” Houdini asks. “Our hands? No, I can do it. I can climb it.” He grips the fence again, starts to hoist himself up and feels a hand grip the back of his jumpsuit, holding him still and he thinks it’s Adelaide again but, when he glances over his shoulder, he sees that it’s Doyle instead. “You know, the longer we stand around here, the more likely we’ll get caught. I could have been over this damn thing by now if you guys hadn’t—”

“Stop,” Doyle commands, in a voice that Houdini figures was used only for times when Doyle was angry at his children for misbehaving. “Look there,” he says, gestures to a nearby tree a few feet away from the fence, the top of it only a couple inches taller than the wire and Houdini berates himself for not seeing it earlier (this was unlike him, not being as aware of his surroundings as he usually was and he blames it, once again, on exhaustion and preoccupation) and he hops back down onto solid ground, brushing his hands off and walking over to it. There wasn’t much to grab onto, to push his heels against, and he’d have to balance himself on a branch he could only cross his fingers that would take his weight, but it was doable. It would have to be, or they were going to be stuck sneaking out some other way and hoping somebody driving by would be prepared to pick them up. He wasn’t even sure of where they exactly were; for all Houdini knew, they could be days away from where he remembered the facility being. If no one helped them, they’d have to walk and determination would only get someone so far.

The climb is easier than it had seemed but he’s still sweating by the time he reaches the top, wipes at his forehead with the back of his arm. He grabs on to the longest extended branch, feels it sag as he tries to put his leg on it, pulls back, takes in a deep breath and then tries a second time, crawling over the empty space towards the fence. The wood creaks and something behind him cracks. He keeps moving, his knees gripping the branch on either side, using his hands to pull him forward, the bark scraping against his palms. Another crack and he digs his fingernails into the bark. _So close_. The branch bounces and he feels the barbed wire brush against his legs, catch on his pants, pulling at the fabric. _Almost there…_

A deafening snap, and the branch breaks.

He panics, launches himself forward as there’s suddenly nothing but barbed wire and empty air beneath him and he moves with instinct, his hand grabbing _something_ for support and then immediately feels nothing but a shock of pain. He lets go, practically does a somersault and lands hard on his back on the other side of the fence. He blinks up at the pale grey sky and, for a moment, the world moves in slow motion. He can hear voices shouting at him from somewhere, familiar voices. He lifts his hand, holds it above his face and something wet drops by the corner of his mouth. He thinks that it’s raining, wonders idly if he remembered seeing the fence slapped with a fresh coat of still-wet, red paint. He drops his arm, slowly turns his head to the side and he sees grass, a space under a car, looks past it and there are feet and then bodies crouched down, staring at him. They’re trying to speak to him and he blinks again, listens.

“—dini! Harry! Harry, get up!” _Get up_. There’s a voice in his head now, too, that sounds like his mother. _Get up, Harry_. “Harry, are you alright? Oh my god.” He sits up gradually, looks around at the vehicles he landed between, at the cars in front of him, uses his red hand to help heave himself up and it _hurts_. He stumbles, uses the other one still in the cast but at least it’s more stable. On his feet, he looks behind him, sees a broken branch on the ground, resting on tangled tree roots. _At least the fence wasn’t too high_ , Houdini thinks. He’d be dealing with a lot of broken bones if it was and then nobody would be going anywhere any time soon. Now all he had was an addled brain and a hand he’s decided he doesn’t have time to acknowledge again for the time being.

He fishes the car keys from his pocket, feels his hand brush against the stun gun he hopes wasn’t broken and the keys slip in his fingers that shake as he pushes the button, covering the fob with sticky blood. An SUV flashes its lights at him and he pushes the button again, listens to the vehicle beep. _I told you where I was_ , the car seems to say, _calm down_. Houdini walks over to it, yanks on the handle, leaves a handprint behind and throws himself into the driver’s seat, starting the engine. He still has to get to his friends. He’s still trapped. He throws the car into reverse, pulls out of his spot, bashes into the vehicle behind him and keeps going, pushes it out of the way to create more room to move, throws the gear into drive and turns to face the fence.

The bodies on the other side seem to understand without him having to say anything and they dive out of the way as Houdini slams his foot on the accelerator and drives forward without hesitation. The nose of the car crashes into the fence, rips it from the ground and then he finally remembers to hit the brakes, jerking forward when the car suddenly stops. His door opens and he looks to see Doyle standing there, reaching for him, and Houdini leans sideways into his hands.

“Harry,” Doyle says, holding him up, “Please say something.”

“I think I cut my hand,” Houdini says, allows Doyle to help him out of the vehicle, stands in front of him still slightly dazed from the fall, feels Doyle take his hand and make a noise. “Is it bad?” Houdini asks, starts to look but Doyle holds it further away, covers it with his own hand.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, with a voice simmering quietly with concern. Adelaide is there next and then so is Six and Doyle looks at her.

“You’ll have to drive. I’ll get in back with Harry.” Adelaide nods, boosts herself into the seat that Houdini had abandoned, and he sees her grab the steering wheel and then pull her hands away, inspecting the tacky residue that had been left behind, glances nervously down at the pair of them still standing there. Six climbs wordlessly into the passenger seat, Doyle pushing Houdini into the back.

“Oh no,” they hear Adelaide say and, from a building off to the side, there’s a stream of multi-color suited bodies running in their direction, shouting at them to stop. She makes a sharp turn right, speeds across the pavement like a bowling ball and the bodies part like terrified pins, untouched. There’s another way out—not the way they had planned to go—and she barrels down the road, follows the painted arrows, hopefully leading them towards an exit. They’re coming up on a booth with a man inside, a heavy gate at the end of the path but Adelaide doesn’t pause. The security guard seems to have a split second of debating if letting them crash was worth it and then decides against it and the gate opens, the edge of it scraping the side of Six’s door as they rush through the gap before it completely opens and then they finally burst out onto a street.

Adelaide spins the wheel and a car behind them leans on the horn but lets them through and they go tearing down the road, speeding until Adelaide finds an exit onto a highway and then seems to realize that they weren’t being chased, that if she kept this up they’d definitely be pulled over and she cools down, relaxes her foot on the gas and keeps to the limit until they can’t see buildings anymore and all that’s around them is a road going the other way,trees, and untamed weeds. She pulls onto the shoulder, loosens her white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel and shuts the car off, wiping her hands on her jumpsuit, leaving sweat and faint swipes of Houdini’s blood behind.

Doyle had managed to find on old sweatshirt that belonged to Bradshaw on the floor by their feet and had wrapped it around Houdini’s hand, was holding it there, clutching onto it more tightly than he probably needed to be holding it.

“We need to get Houdini to a hospital,” Doyle says and Houdini startles them by laughing.

“Great idea. Just walk the dead man right into a hospital.” He wiggles his fingers inside the sweater, touches each one to his thumb. At least he had that. “Is it really that bad?” He asks and Doyle turns his hand over, moves the fabric, holds it down to blot at the bleeding slices and puncture wounds, stares at the small tears in skin.

“Perhaps not. You’re bleeding fairly heavily though. If these don’t get stitched, I’ll be more worried about how much you’ll have lost. We certainly don’t have the ability to give you a transfusion,” Doyle says, goes to wrap Houdini’s hand again. “How are you feeling? Lightheaded? Any nausea?”

“I’ll live,” Houdini says, which he knows doesn’t exactly answer Doyle’s question but he lets it go for the moment, turns to look at Adelaide and she stares at him through the rearview mirror.

“Then we need supplies. If we won’t get him proper help, then I’ll have to do it myself.”

“You _are_ proper help,” Houdini says. “These supplies. I suppose we’ll be stealing them? Or will we purchase them with the money none of us have?”

“Before we left,” Adelaide says, “Bradshaw told me there was something in the glove box we might find useful.” She nods to Six, gestures for it to open the compartment by its knees and he does, leans over and sticks its arm inside, brings out handfuls of manuals, garbage and, eventually, a leather wallet, which it holds carefully in the palm of its hand. It then curls its fingers around it, flips it over and carefully pulls it open. Credit cards, a driver’s license, expired gift cards, and a few bills of cash made from recycled plastic. Adelaide takes the wallet from Six, holds it up to show the others before taking a moment to inspect it herself. “We won’t be able to use his cards. The company would likely get suspicious if someone started to use them, especially since he’s supposed to be in space. There isn’t much cash, unfortunately. Enough to get us what we need. Maybe where we need to go.”

“Speaking of…” Houdini starts. His hand is starting to throb in tune with his heart and it’s an unsettling feeling. “Where the hell _are_ we, exactly?” Adelaide starts the car again, leaves the engine idle and turns on the GPS. It takes a minute to spring to life, to calculate their location, tired signals from an old machine bouncing off of satellites beyond the thick clouds but, eventually, the name of the town they’re in flashes up on the screen.

“Lyford?” Doyle questions. “Never heard of it.”

“Me neither,” Adelaide says. “Where should I tell it we’re going?” ‘Home’ was the first thought Houdini had and, by the look in Doyle’s eyes, he was thinking the same thing, but that was pain and exhaustion whispering in their ears. The next thing Houdini wants to tell her is the address for the building they were interrogated in when they first got back from the _Ark Royal_ , the place where they were sent off to be blown up, the last place any of them saw Agent Holst, but he can’t remember specifics, just knows what city it was near, could probably lead them the rest of the way once he was on familiar territory.

“Just put in our city,” Houdini says. _Our city_. “We’ll figure it out from there.” Adelaide fumbles with the machine, the touch screen having trouble reacting to her fingers. It’s not one of the newer models that came standard with vehicles these days, Houdini notices. It was one Bradshaw had to buy separately, had to plug into the car’s battery to keep it charged and Houdini wonders how long Bradshaw has really been stuck up there on the _Pelican_ , going back and forth between Earth and Mars, never really staying long on either of them. He gave up his car and his wallet. Did he ever think he was going to be anywhere else or was that it for him? An eternity on a cargo ship, in charge of faces that would come and go and might not remember him ten or twenty years down the line. _My skill set isn’t particularly tuned for doing much else_ , Houdini remembers him saying.

“Says it’ll take sixteen hours to drive there,” Adelaide says, interrupting Houdini’s thoughts. “Not bad, all things considered. We’ll find some place to buy what you need for Houdini and then we have to find somewhere to turn around. We’re facing the wrong direction.” She takes the car out of ‘park’, signals and moves easily back into the flow of traffic, the vehicle blending in effortlessly with all the other unvaried metal boxes on wheels that glided around them.

 

. . . .

 

There’s a rest stop just a mile or two up the road, a large lot lined with fast food restaurants, trash novelty stores, and a convenience store, it’s bright sign buzzing and flashing in the center. The parking lot is packed with family cars stuffed with suitcases and pillows, bare feet from resting roadtrippers propped up on dashboards, arms with cigarettes hanging out of windows, people sitting on the roofs of their cars, eating burgers and sipping on sodas longer than their arms despite the fact that it’s still morning. Massive trucks drink down gas at the station just a little ways beyond the cars, the drivers stretching their legs, talking to their travelling companions, calling home to say good morning to the families they hardly ever see. It surprises Houdini that, despite the innumerable changes and advances in the past hundred or so years, not much has really managed to change.

“You two stay here,” Adelaide says to Doyle and Houdini, taking off her seatbelt. “Six and I will get what you need since we’re slightly less conspicuous.” She’s still got paintbrush-like swirls of his blood on her jumpsuit but, as long as nobody stared too carefully, it was likely they’d never even notice. The doors slam shut and Houdini watches them wander off towards the collection of buildings before settling as far back behind the tinted windows as he could to avoid anybody accidentally peering through to the inside.

He feels like he could sleep for days, considers starting in on it now but decides against it, figures that Doyle might take it as a bad sign and treat it as if Houdini was dying right at that very moment so he just leans his head back instead, stares up at the ceiling, pulls the cover back from the sunroof so he can see the sky.

“This is a nightmare,” Doyle says and he speaks it so softly that Houdini isn’t sure he was even meant to hear it.

“What did it look like?” Houdini asks. “When I fell.”

“Awful,” Doyle says. “We saw the branch snap… It was so loud, I could practically feel it inside my chest. I saw you vault yourself forward and grab the barbed wire with your hand. You performed quite an impressive somersault and then vanished. We heard you hit the ground. For a moment I feared…” He pauses, swallows. “We thought we’d see you with your skull cracked open like a raw egg. You’re lucky to have survived.” Houdini doesn’t respond for a short time after Doyle finishes and Doyle turns to stare at him. “Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“Just making sure.” _Making sure you’re still awake. Still alive._ “Are you sure you’re feeling alright? You impacted the ground quite hard…”

“It wasn’t that far,” Houdini says. He’ll definitely start to feel it later, though, that was for sure (he already was: his body was getting stiff, muscles sore, and there was a twinge of pain when he breathed in but it wasn’t worth mentioning).

“Alright,” Doyle says as if he doesn’t believe him, pats Houdini’s injured, wrapped hand and stares out the windshield, waiting for the other two to return.

 

. . . .

 

Doyle works by the weak light from the sunroof, Houdini’s hand palm-up in his lap as he sews his wounds together with black thread and a thin needle from a travel-size sewing kit that Adelaide had bought, bloody gauze littering the seats and floor, stacks of clean squares of the material resting on his knee and, every now and then, he uses some to clean off Houdini’s skin so he can see what he’s doing.

Adelaide had returned with two bags: one for Doyle and another with water and the shortbread textured meal bars, apologizes for taking so long, saying that Six had tried asking her for the word for everything it saw and what it’s purpose was, seemingly fascinated the most by both a rack of women’s cosmetic mirrors and an endless display of gummies shaped like various animals. It had made Adelaide purchase the ones that looked like what she told him were sharks and Six now sat in the passenger seat as they waited, ripping the plastic package open and carefully putting the candy between its back teeth, tearing the soft, neon blue shark in half and chewing thoughtfully. It didn’t spit it out the same way it had coughed up the coffee or refused the meals on the _Pelican_. _Who knew that sludge had sweet-tooth_ , Houdini thinks.

“Well, I think we’ve wasted enough time,” Houdini says once Doyle snips the last bit of thread and he holds up his hand, inspects his palm, stares at the scattered mess of stitched up injuries and briefly wonders if he can connect them into something meaningful but then remembers it’s just his brain playing tricks on him. Humans tended to make themselves find patterns and faces in everything that didn’t have one.

“This time was only wasted because of you,” Adelaide says, sounding far more bitter than she should have and then she sighs when she glances at Houdini’s frown in the rearview mirror, takes a drink of water. “Sorry. I’m just tired.”

“Perhaps I should take over for a few hours,” Doyle says but Adelaide shakes her head.

“I can handle it.” She starts the engine and rolls down her window, letting in the warm air and the outside cacophony of a hundred different voices and the cars speeding past beside them, sounding like ocean waves crashing on a rocky shore.

She joins the rest of the tide and, despite fighting it, Houdini feels his eyes start to close as he listens to the rush of wind and a soft tune that Doyle is humming next to him.

 

. . . .

 

Adelaide is drowning in an ocean of sludge and Houdini tries to save her, dives below the surface and feels the thick, muddy liquid go up his nose, seep in through past lips pushed tightly together and he searches blindly for her, manages to grab hold of her hand but it slips away too easily. Up for air, dripping in muck, and it stings his eyes when he blinks.

 _Houdini!_ She’s screaming for him, flailing, and he tries again but fails, is being pulled under as well. The sludge tastes like syrup with a fine skin of mold and oil skimmed along the surface. Somebody grabs him and pulls him free and he crawls onto solid ground, looks up at his savior to see Bradshaw standing over him.

“You okay?”

“Adelaide!” Houdini exclaims. “She’s drowning. We have to help her!” He gets up, tries to go back but runs into a glass wall now separating him from the area he was pulled from. He can’t even see her anymore.

“You can’t save ‘em all,” Bradshaw says. “Come on.” He leads Houdini down a long hallway, past another room separated from him by glass and Houdini watches as, inside, Doyle is strapped to a chair and electrocuted. It’s not enough to kill him but it’s enough to make it hurt, and he’s leaking sludge from his ears, his eyes, his nose. Houdini tries to attack the glass but it won’t break and he has nothing to throw against it except his body. Bradshaw stops him, shakes his head. “Can’t save ‘em all.”

There’s his mother in another room, unharmed but pacing, weeping. There’s a door this time, unlocked, and Houdini opens it, goes over to her and tries to touch her, to talk to her. She stares at him, horrified, and starts screaming, shouting curses, hitting him. _You aren’t my boy! He’s dead! Why are you taunting me!_ _Get out! Get out! GET OUT!_

Houdini backs away, leaves, his head spinning. Bradshaw is waiting for him in the hallway.

“Can’t save—”

“Shut up,” Houdini says, but continues to follow him. Suddenly, they’re back on the _Ark Royal_ , standing on a platform, the ladder behind them stretching on for much further than it should have been able to go. The ship had been big, but it wasn’t _that_ big.

“This is where I leave you,” Bradshaw says, takes a step forward and Houdini thinks he’s going to hop on the ladder, go somewhere else and Houdini could follow him anyway, but Bradshaw simply walks off the edge instead, his body plummeting down into the pitch black below.

“Can’t save them all,” says a monotone voice behind him and Houdini turns just in time to see Six before it pushes him off the platform.

 

. . . .

 

Houdini awakens with a start, checks his surroundings carefully, disoriented when he sees Doyle behind the wheel, Adelaide strapped into the spot next to him. He goes to rub his hands over his face and then regrets it immediately, the cast on his right hand scraping his skin, the swollen, sewn together one sending a jolt of pain all the way down his arm.

“How long was I—?” He asks, peers out the window at dying trees and unlit street lamps.

“About six hours,” Adelaide tells him. “What were you dreaming about? It seemed like a nightmare.”

“I don’t remember,” Houdini lies. “Weren’t you supposed to be driving?”

“I did. I only just relinquished the seat to Doyle a few minutes ago.” She tugs her seatbelt away from her neck, shifts, exhaling slowly. Houdini takes a moment to wake up a bit more, scratches his eye with the back of a finger, glances at Six who is still in the passenger seat staring, unblinking, out the windshield at the vehicle directly ahead of them, its out-of-state license plate glinting as the sun attempted to claw its way out from behind the clouds. “What, exactly,” Adelaide asks, “Is our plan?”

“We find the building, kick the door down, find my mother, and demand some answers,” Houdini says. “What else do you need to know?”

“You really think they’re just going to let us drive up to their front door and ram it down?”

“Of course they won’t ‘let us’,” Houdini says. “Doesn’t mean we can’t try. We could always sneak in. The only door I know about for sure is the front. There’re probably hidden ones all over the place but it’s not as if they exactly gave any of us the grand tour of facility while we were there.”

“The only one with us who would know that is Kirby and, well…” Adelaide shifts uncomfortably and glances at the back of Six’s head and then leans forward slightly. “I don’t suppose you know everything that Kirby did? Can you communicate with him at all?”

“No,” Six says. “His brain is shutting down.” Doyle swerves, nearly drives them off the road but then manages to straighten them out, another SUV blaring its horn at them as it speeds past.

“What did you say?” Doyle asks. If Six really knew what shrugging was, it might have done it.

“His brain is shutting down,” Six repeats. “I take over. The brain of your lifeform cannot handle the both of us. It is not fighting back the same as the others but it is still me or him.”

“How about him, then,” Houdini says and Six doesn’t respond for a few seconds other than to click at him.

“I leave, I die. I leave now, he also likely dies.”

“He’s dying anyway,” Houdini says. “We’d just be getting rid of you, too.” More silence and Houdini can feel the disapproval radiating from Adelaide and he wants to ask her if she’s forgotten that this sludge wasn’t their friend, just an enemy that happened to have a ship and a shared interest in finding out the truth and that they didn’t necessarily _need_ Six hanging around from this point onwards. Houdini absently touches at the stun gun that Gardner had given him but remembers how it only had two barely powerful charges, figures it wouldn’t be nearly enough to do anything but cause it a little pain.

 

. . . .

 

It’s nearly one on the morning by the time they reach the city, Adelaide behind the wheel again, the sky glowing with oranges and purples from the skyscraper lights, the stars disappearing under the invisible haze of pollution. Once upon time, places like this used to be beautiful monuments to human ingenuity and architectural genius but, as the years dragged on, it became tired and overfilled, weeds growing untamed between buildings and through the parks. People still lived here, thrived here, and Houdini couldn’t imagine being anywhere else, but it was something you were born into or something you spent years cultivating a tolerance for, the disorder and metal monsters looming over you as you tripped over unrepaired sidewalks. There were supposed to be other cities out there that were still shiny and new, under constant redevelopment and Houdini had been to a few of them, basked in the luxury, but he could never stay away from the place he had built for himself and his mother for very long.

His window is open and he smells the hot air, the tinges of sewage and street cart food, of stores and clubs pumping their own unique and occasionally trademarked scents as people walked by, the new way to entice strangers in through their doors. It was usually different kinds of food—even if the store didn’t sell any—but there was also clean soap, fresh soil, perfumes that people’s great-great-grandmother’s wore, cigarette smoke, and a bookstore that had hired someone to figure out how novels that used to be made of paper smelled. It was the sort of thing that gave tourists and new arrivals headaches, a thousand different scents wafting at them at once, malfunctioning machines coughing up rotten eggs and decay. You either got used to it or you never did. Houdini had heard about some people voluntarily cutting out their sense of smell just so they could stay in their expensive apartments and jobs that more and more people weren’t allowed to talk about getting paid to do. It was all rumors of course and, as far as he knew, they were all just addicted to daily dosages of painkillers.

They stop at a red light and Houdini stares at a news billboard attached to the side of a wide building just beside them, the screen running through brief updates. Near the end of the cycle Houdini sees his own face, the date of his supposed death and a new photo, a snapshot of the warehouse his body was found in, a machine he never built surrounding an empty area on the dirty floor where a lump was covered by a white sheet, police tape criss-crossing around the scene just barely cropped out of view. It sends a shudder down his spine and he forces himself to look away. Did they borrow a body from somewhere or did they find someone who looked like him and had them killed? How did they convince the authorities that it was, indeed, Harry Houdini? The only way to conceal the identity of a person after death these days would be to rip them to shreds, to burn them, to steal their teeth or just make sure they were never found, which was entirely the opposite of what Agent Holst wanted. She must have paid people off or just simply convinced them and, either way, that wasn’t even close to being good news.

“What now?” Adelaide asks and a hundred possible places go through Houdini’s head, but every single one required both money and him having to risk revealing his face to the public. Normally people around here didn’t care who wandered around but with his face plastered on screens everywhere, it would be fresh in the minds of mourners and the disinterested masses alike, eyes quickly trained to see even so much as the shape of his nose if he was sitting in a dark alley. With his reputation, he didn’t discount the conspiracy theorists and fans still claiming that this was all just the beginning of a new stunt and, any day now, he’d pop up somewhere alive. Until then, they’d study everything, clamoring to see if they would be the one to find him. It happened three years ago with Hilario Wolford and, ten years before that, with Edda Yoon. When you spend your life fooling an audience into believing that everything is a trick, that their eyes aren’t always so reliable, dying isn’t always the easiest thing to do, even if you do it right front of them.

“My house,” Doyle says. “It’s only an hour outside the city. The children are with their relative. The only one there is the NannAI and she won’t be any trouble.”

“They could be watching it,” Adelaide says.

“Not if they believe we’re dead,” Doyle says. “And, if they are there, perhaps we’ll be able to get our answers sooner than we expected.”

 

. . . .

 

Doyle’s home is smaller than Houdini thought it would be, a neat little three-story building with a domed roofs of curved solar panels, a gnarled tree in the front yard, the deep red of the painted shingles looking almost black against the night sky. Adelaide keeps them away, sitting in the car for a few minutes, but if there was anybody watching them, they wouldn’t be able to see them hidden in the darkness that closed in on them from every side.

Houdini can see the stars again but they’ll never be as clear as they were when he was floating amongst them and he idly wonders if he’ll ever be able to go back there again.

They pull into the stone driveway, tires crunching, and a light on the garage triggers with their motion, illuminating them in a comfortable orange glow. The lights follow them as they walk to the expansive front porch, a low ceiling hanging over them held up by rounded pillars, and Doyle stands at the dark wood front door, tries the brass knob and almost seems disappointed that it was locked.

“I forget occasionally,” Doyle says. “I was hoping I might have this time.”

“I can break us in,” Houdini says, takes a step forward and mentally goes through everything they had with them and what he could use as tools but Doyle holds out a hand to stop him and then reaches over to ring the doorbell. They wait and wait and, just before Houdini is going to suggest breaking in for a second time, the door opens and an AI is standing there, her bald head glinting under the porch light, her slim, off-white body nothing but bare metal and her mechanical eyes blink slowly at him. She’s much higher tech than the usual NannAIs that Houdini has seen but then he remembers where she had originally come from (an AI reprogrammed after the disaster at Ortov-Chen Technologies, only saved through a combination of unexpected heroism and Doyle’s celebrity).

“Mister Conan Doyle,” she says, her human-like voice tinged with layers of computerized whispers and subtle static. “You’re back. Are the children with you?”

“No, Nan,” Doyle says, sounding slightly nervous and ashamed. “They’re still with their relatives.”

“Is something the matter, Mister Conan Doyle?”

“Yes, actually,” Doyle confesses and the NannAI (that Doyle had referred to as ‘Nan’) steps off to the side to allow them in.

“Is there anything I can do?” Nan asks, closing the heavy door behind them.

“You can put hot water on for tea,” Doyle says. “I think my friends and I could use a change of clothes.”

“Right away,” Nan says, and walks off to the right of the foyer, through a large dining room and then an expansive doorway where she flicks on a light to reveal the kitchen. There’s a living room to their left with Victorian designed furniture, the wallpaper dark green and patterned, uniform over every wall downstairs as if the decorator had bought too much and figured they could just slap it in every room and nobody would mind. A staircase, gaps between each step, goes up and curves around a corner onto a landing where closed doors stretched out either way, disappearing behind pieces of beige-painted walls.

“Nice place,” Houdini says and, for once, he isn’t exactly poking fun. It reminded him of the homes of the wealthier kids he knew growing up, the ones who’s parents didn’t want to flaunt that they had deep pockets but, if you really looked at their home, at their possessions, you could definitely tell that they weren’t shopping for furniture at the discount warehouse stores by strip malls and run-down fast food joints.

“Yes. Well. It’s alright,” Doyle says, starts to ascend the staircase and the others follow, listening as Nan clatters dishes in the kitchen, her metal feet making surprisingly soft noise on the tile floor as she moved around. Doyle leads them down the carpeted hallway to a room at the very end and opens the door to reveal his bedroom, which Houdini immediately pushes past the others to walk into and flop down face-first on the bed, breathing in the lived-in smell of the blankets before turning his head to stare at an ornate wardrobe on the other side of the room. “I should have some clothes that will fit the two of you,” Doyle says, directing the words to Houdini and Six, and then he hesitates. “I suppose Adelaide will have to borrow something from my… from my wife.”

“I don’t have to,” Adelaide says and Houdini wonders when Doyle had told Adelaide about her, because her tone suggested that she already knew the story. Either that, or she was otherwise very, very good at guessing that something was terribly wrong with the woman just from Doyle’s body language and way of speaking alone. She was a Security Officer, after all. They probably trained them for things like that.

“No. You should. It’s fine,” Doyle says in a way that even Six could probably tell was definitely not fine. “There are some things she had planned on getting rid of. I still have them in a garbage bag in the closet.” Houdini watches Doyle sideways as he opens the dark-stained closet door and hauls out an enormous black bag stuffed with old clothes, gestures at it and steps back before moving on to the wardrobe as Adelaide starts picking through the bag, pulling out old t-shirts and what Houdini assumes were out-of-fashion pants. “Here we are,” Doyle says, opening a drawer, taking out a few shirts of his own, laying them folded on the mattress beside Houdini’s head, follows them with another drawer, this one with pants, and picks through them before selecting three pairs and adding them to the pile.

“Are you going to dress me, too?” Houdini asks, voice slightly muffled from the side of his mouth pressing into the bed. He’s teasing him but then realizes tiredly that he might actually need a bit of help, his stitched-up hand progressing past simple pain to being almost completely stiff.

“Absolutely not,” Doyle says. “Come on, get up.”

“Just a minute,” Houdini says, doesn’t move. Just a couple more minutes of lying there. He feels his eyelids getting heavy and he doesn’t understand how he can be so damn tired and he jumps when someone nudges his shoulder, waking him up.

“Get up, Harry,” Doyle says. “Clothes first, then you can sleep.”

“Fine,” Houdini sighs, hoists himself into a sitting position, rubbing at his face with the back of his hand. Adelaide has disappeared to get changed in another room and Six has somehow already gotten himself dressed. Houdini can see deep purple and green bruises from unhealed skin blotched on the neck of Kirby’s body and disappearing down the collar of the shirt Six had put on and he swallows, clears his throat and makes himself turn to pick through what else Doyle had chosen for them to wear. He makes himself stand and kicks off his shoes, peels off the bloody, dirty Frontier Works jumpsuit, takes off the rest to leave them in a pile on the floor, pulls the soft, feature-less shirt over his head and then step into the black pants that were just slightly too loose around his waist. “There. Dressed.”

Doyle is in the middle of pulling his own shirt down over his face when Adelaide walks back in, wearing a loose shirt with a band name Houdini had never heard of plastered across the front, a smiling cat logo winking at them from the back. When Doyle sees her he blinks, stares just a bit too long, a bit too strangely, before finally looking away, forcing himself to keep his gaze only on the area above Adelaide’s shoulders.

There are footsteps on the stairs and they all seem to freeze as if they forgot they weren’t the only ones home and Nan peers her bald head around the doorway, her metal fingers clutching the frame.

“Tea is ready,” Nan says, eyes the dirty clothes on the floor. “Should I wash those?” Doyle thinks about it for a moment and Nan waits patiently.

“Yes,” Doyle says eventually. “They can be washed. But if… if you can’t get the blood out then just throw them away. They aren’t extraordinarily important.”

“Blood,” Nan repeats, as if she’s checking that she heard him correctly.

“Blood,” Doyle confirms.

“Okay,” Houdini says, interrupting them, “This is getting a little weird so I’m going to let you guys sort this out and go downstairs.” He moves past them, slides past Nan and walks barefoot down the stairs, wandering towards the kitchen, and he hears other feet behind him, doesn’t look to see who it is until he’s seated at the kitchen island, it’s marble countertop gleaming in the low lights, a hot mug steaming between his hands. Adelaide takes a mug for herself and stands across from him, elbows pressed onto the cold marble.

“Tea,” Houdini hears Six say, padding into the room, leaning over to stare into one of the two mugs left.

“Dried leaves,” Adelaide says, “Steeped in hot water.”

“Plant life?” Six asks and Adelaide nods. It picks up one of the mugs carefully, sniffs at it and then takes a sip. It doesn’t seem to hate it, but it doesn’t go in for another taste, instead puts the mug back down, turning the handle away from itself. “Better than coffee.”

“Everything is better than coffee,” Adelaide says.

“You drink it,” Six says to her.

“You’d be surprised,” Adelaide says, “What humans do even though they don’t like it.”

“Killing?” Six asks.

“Unfortunately,” Doyle says, walking into the room, “You’ll find far too many of us who enjoy that a little too much.” He picks up the last unclaimed mug, allows the steam to float up his nose, curl over his face before taking a drink. Houdini holds up his own mug near the center of the island and it takes a moment for Adelaide and Doyle to understand what he’s trying to do.

“What’s that for?” Adelaide asks.

“For surviving so far. Not bad for a magician, a writer, a Security Officer, and some sludge,” Houdini says. “Also because I don’t know what’s going to happen next and this could be the last quiet moment we have for a long time.” _It could be the last time we’re all together in the same room, alive_ , Houdini thinks as their mugs clink together.

 _Can’t save ‘em all_ , he hears in Bradshaw’s voice and he takes a healthy swallow, the tea burning comfortingly as it pours down his throat.

 

. . . .

 

After that, everyone scatters. Adelaide goes to lie down, Six saying something about going outside, Doyle telling him to go no further than the porch before disappearing somewhere inside his own house, leaving Houdini to explore, his exhaustion still nesting over his bones but easier to ignore as long as he was standing upright. He finds Nan in the laundry room near the back of the house, watches her sort articles of clothing, scrub at the blood stains with a foamy, harsh smelling chemical and he thinks she might be singing softly to herself but it could just be her electronics humming and buzzing in a sort of musical noise.

Eventually, he goes back upstairs, peeks into the doors, finds obviously unused guest rooms, a bathroom, the children’s bedrooms and finally what appears to be Doyle’s study, a large desk with a computer propped up on it placed in front of a stained glass window, the rest of the surface scattered with pens, paper-thin tablets, scribbled out notes, and a couple of picture frames, the type that displayed not a photo, but a ten second looped video, this one of Doyle and his family together at a beach somewhere, laughing as the children tried to run from the camera, impatient to get back to the water. There’s a fireplace with soft grey ashes piled in the bottom from forgotten fires, the walls lined with bookcases of real paper books, some of them most likely fifty (or more) years old. He’s scanning the shelves, fingers brushing the cracked leather and occasionally non-legible spines when he hears Doyle ask from the doorway:

“What are you doing?”

“This is where the magic happens, huh?” Houdini asks, points at the desk, tries to read the notes Doyle had written for himself but Doyle marches in and flips them over, using a nearby book about 1950s law to keep them covered. “Shouldn’t someone know how the next book is going to end? Since you won’t be around to finish it.”

“Houdini… Please,” Doyle says, closes his eyes. _Not right now_.

“Where’d you find all these books?” Houdini asks next, changes the subject much to Doyle’s obvious relief.

“Collectors. Yard sales. Auction houses.”

“Yard sales,” Houdini says. “I didn’t know people still did those. Not a lot of yards anymore.” He pulls a heavy, red-leather bound book from a shelf at eye level and lays it across his left arm, opening it to a random page. There are little bookmarks, dog-eared pages, and pencil marks inside. “This is all law stuff.”

“They have to be. It’s what my character does,” Doyle says. The book is heavier than it seemed and Houdini fumbles it, loses his grip and the heavy spine digs it’s sharp angles into his hand. He curses, drops the book on the floor and holds his hand by the wrist, the wounds throbbing again. “For Christ’s sake,” Doyle says, coming over to him to inspect the damage but, luckily, none of the black thread stitches had popped. “I’m very concerned about it. It’s still swollen.”

“It could have been a lot worse.”

“It could _always_ be a lot worse,” Doyle says. “Doesn’t make the current situation any less bad.”

“That was a good line,” Houdini says, “You ever think about becoming a writer?”

“Funny,” Doyle says as if he’s wholly unamused but there’s an edge of a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “I think Adelaide has taken my bed. I’m sure you’ve found the guest rooms by now. There’s only two so…”

“So Six can sleep on the couch,” Houdini says.

“I don’t think Six actually sleeps,” Doyle says. “I’ve certainly never seen it myself.” He pauses. “Go get some sleep yourself. I should make sure Six hasn’t gotten lost out there and then I’ll—”

“—Join me?” Houdini finishes for him, watches as Doyle flushes bright red, stammers at him, lets go of Houdini’s hand that he had still been absently inspecting. “I’m kidding. Relax. You're so easily flustered. It's almost not even worth it anymore.”

“I will never understand how you can keep joking around at a time like this.”

“Because if I don’t, I’ll explode,” Houdini says. If he doesn’t, if he allowed every tiny corner of his brain to be consumed by the worming thought of what Agent Holst could have done (or was currently doing to) his mother, he’d break down and that wouldn’t be much of a help to anyone.

 

. . . .

 

Houdini doesn’t go to one of the guest rooms, instead finds himself at the end of the hall, standing in front of the door to Doyle’s bedroom where Adelaide currently was and he raises a fist to knock but stops himself. He doesn’t want to wake her if she’s sleeping and he’s not even sure what he wanted to say. He hears the front door open downstairs as Doyle goes outside to find Six and Houdini is about to walk away but startles when Adelaide’s door opens and there she is, surprised when she sees Houdini standing on the other side.

“Oh!” She says, keeps a hand clutched on the door. “I was just… Well, I was just going to find you.”

“Really?” Houdini asks and Adelaide shrugs awkwardly, almost embarrassed.

“I can’t sleep,” Adelaide says. “I’ve gotten too used to sleeping on a ship, all that humming and machinery. It’s too quiet here.” Houdini understands. It was surprisingly easy to get used to the thrumming of a ship’s engine as it worked—especially if you spent most of your life living in a city—but now they were here, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and the hush of nature was almost overbearing. He’s going to comment on it, ask her if she wanted to find somewhere with more noise, joke about sleeping on the floor of the laundry room by the machines but then Adelaide looks as if she heard something, standing slightly on her toes as she tries to look around Houdini’s shoulder. “Did you hear that?” She asks and Houdini shakes his head. Even with the quiet surrounding them, the house was surprisingly insulated from the outside.

“I didn’t—” He starts to say but she pushes past him, rushes down the hall, thudding down the stairs and he follows. “What was it?”

“It sounded like a car,” she says, bare feet slapping against the wooden floor and she hauls the heavy front door open, walking out onto the porch, the motion sensor lights still on and Houdini comes up behind her but doesn’t see anything that might have sounded like— _He doesn’t see anything_.

“Doyle went out to find Six,” Houdini says, calls Doyle’s name but gets no response, hops off the porch to stand on the stone walkway that bisected the front yard, calls for him again, hears Adelaide do the same behind him.

“What’s going on?” They hear, turn to see Nan standing in the open doorway.

“Doyle went out to—” Adelaide begins to say, waves it off. Doesn’t matter. “Did he come back in?”

“No,” Nan says. “He went out but certainly did not come back inside. I was in the kitchen. I would have heard.” She pauses. “I heard a car.” Adelaide glances at Houdini as if to prove that she hadn’t been hearing things but he hadn’t completely doubted her. He looks away, turns back to the pitch black ahead of him and shouts Doyle’s name again, shouts for Six but there’s no answer. “You have a flashlight anywhere in the house?” Houdini asks Nan, who doesn’t move other than to lift her hand, turn something on her finger and a little hatch opens in her palm to reveal a bright, white light hidden within and she walks over to where Houdini was standing.

“What are you looking for?” Nan asks.

“I don’t know,” Houdini says. _Bodies_ , he thinks, because at least if they were just lying unconscious or hurt somewhere nearby, they could be brought back, patched up. He walks around the front yard, Nan at his side lighting his path, the dry grass cool against the bottom of his feet but there’s nothing. Doyle had only been outside for a minute, maybe less. How far could either of them have gotten? He calls for them, but his voice just disappears over the flat land around them.

They’re gone. They’re both gone and, this time, it was right under Houdini’s goddamn nose.

 

. . . .

 

“This means that the house definitely _was_ being watched,” Adelaide says. “We shouldn’t have come here.” The three of them—Houdini, Adelaide, and Nan—are back in the kitchen, standing around the island. Nobody had said anything for what felt like hours, a small man somewhere in the back of Houdini’s head screaming at him on a near constant loop. “Why didn’t they just storm in the minute we arrived? Why wait?” She asks, hesitates to give Houdini a chance to answer but, when he doesn’t, she tries to grab at his attention. “Houdini.”

“Two or three times a day since you left,” Nan says instead, her brain whirring as she accesses the information. “A vehicle has driven past the house.”

“The same one every time?” Adelaide asks.

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t think to bring this up earlier?” Houdini questions, speaking through a tightened jaw.

“I hadn’t seen it since Sunday evening. Today is Wednesday,” Nan tells him. “That was a significant gap. I thought it had stopped.” Another pause. “Although I do shut down most nights between midnight and six in the morning. It is possible the driver saw me watching it one afternoon and began only driving past after sundown.”

“So Doyle and Six,” Adelaide says. “They must have just happened to be outside during a drive-by. Wrong place, wrong time.” She sighs. “That seems to happen to us quite a lot.” It certainly did but it was also starting to feel like more than just a simple case of bad luck. Houdini didn’t believe in God, but he was beginning to think that something powerful _somewhere_ was taking great pleasure in messing specifically with them.

If only he could go back and not board the _Ark Royal_. Somebody else would have been left to deal with the sludge and he could have stayed home, kept putting on shows for a loyal, easily astounded audience, been entirely ignorant of the horrors amongst the stars. He would watch the news and feel sorry for the poor people who had to go through that tragedy and then go on about his day.

Hundreds of years and they still hadn’t managed to invent time travel yet. What a waste.

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I think we may be in over our heads,” Adelaide says. “We need help. I might be able to reach out to my captain, Merring, at the Security offices. He might be able to—”

“No,” Houdini says, cuts her off and she blinks at him, frowning.

“Houdini, we can’t just—”

“This is _our_ problem,” Houdini says. “ _Our_ friends." He hesitates for the briefest of moments, realizes he'd just used a plural, had referred to Six as a _friend_. "I’m not going to sit around and wait for a bunch of cops to maybe believe our story. If you were him and you saw one of your officers walk into the building with a man that was supposed to be dead, had been declared dead by _your people_ I might add, would you believe anything they said?”

“Yes,” Adelaide says, hesitates, looks briefly away. “Maybe not.”

“Exactly. Fifty people and AIs with guns storming the castle to liberate Doyle and my mother from the confines of a mysterious agency is a nice thought but it’ll never happen. Sounds more like the cheap ending to one of Doyle’s books.”

“Fine,” Adelaide says. “So then what? We hop in the car and drive there ourselves, hope to find a way in? Just you and me.”

“Pretty much,” Houdini says.

“We don’t even have any weapons.”

“You have this,” Nan says, pulls the stun gun from a compartment in her stomach, putting it down on the marble countertop. “I very nearly washed it. These too,” she says, takes out the three tiny bottles of alcohol that Houdini had confiscated from Doyle all the way back on the shuttle.

“I have that,” Houdini says, pointing to the device.

“And what is ‘that’?” Adelaide asks.

“Gardner made it. Gave it to me before we left,” Houdini says.

“What does it do, exactly?” Adelaide inquires, picks it up and goes to push the button but Houdini stops her, takes it out of her hands.

“It only has two charges.”

“‘Charges’? It’s a taser? You want to go marching into that facility with a _taser_. That only works twice. A taser and three bottles of alcohol.”

“We’ve worked with a lot less,” Houdini says. This was the first time that they were in a situation where they had something worthwhile to fight back with that wasn’t sparking wires or a chair.

“So that’s it then,” Adelaide says, standing up straighter, pressing her palms into the marble. “We’re doing this.”

“We’re doing this.”

“Do you even remember how to get there?” Adelaide asks.

“In a… roundabout, weird sort of way, yes,” Houdini says. “We’ll have to make a detour to the King’s Plaza Hotel where my mother and I were staying when Agent Holst’s friends picked me up. That’s the only way I remember.”

“Right. I suppose that’s better than being completely lost,” Adelaide says. “I’ll see if there’s anything else around here we might be able to bring before we head out. But I swear, Harry Houdini, if we can’t find a reasonable way into that building, we are turning around and getting the proper authorities involved.” She points her finger at him, scolding, and Houdini puts his hand up, twists it so the palm is facing the ceiling with a mock shrug, indicating that he had nothing to say to that. It was easier to agree than to argue.

“I could accompany you,” Nan says. “I am not equipped with weapons but I can help. AIs are strong. I have lifted both of Doyle children at once numerous times.” It’s a tempting offer but Houdini shakes his head.

“I have a feeling Doyle would kill me if something happened to you,” he says.

“Very well,” Nan replies. “I will stay active. If you need further assistance, I will be right in this house.”

“Thank you,” Adelaide says, and touches her lightly on the shoulder. Nan looks at her hand and hums, the closest thing she can manage to a smile.

 

. . . .

 

There isn’t anything else that Houdini can think of to take with them so, after he pulls on his shoes over a pair of borrowed socks, he waits for Adelaide by the front door and, eventually, she descends from the second floor, her hands empty.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing, unless you want to bring a bag of kitchen knives and a bottle of aspirin.”

“I guess it was too much to hope for that Doyle had a gun hidden somewhere,” Houdini says.

“I didn’t even try to look for one. He doesn’t seem the type,” Adelaide says in return and he knows she’s right. Out of the three of them, Doyle was the least likely to have any sort of dangerous weaponry hanging around that wasn’t used for preparing meals.

“What about you? You have to have one at home, right?” Houdini can’t believe he hadn’t considered it before but his optimism balloon is poked by a thin needle when Adelaide tells him that she doesn’t.

“Only specific officers are allowed weapons,” Adelaide says. “I was never one of them. Why would I need one to patrol the _Ark Royal_? Besides, even if I _did_ have one, we’re not allowed to take them home. They stay locked up. You have to check them out like you’re at a library, and officers are barred from purchasing guns for themselves.”

“Why?”

“More prone to paranoia and violent behavior, supposedly,” Adelaide says, puts her hand on the door to open it but Houdini reaches out to stop her, holding her arm and she freezes.

“Is there… I mean, is there someone you want to call before we go?”

“Call? What for?” Adelaide asks. “To say goodbye?”

“To check in. You’ve never mentioned anyone. There’s my mom and Doyle’s kids but you…you know. You don’t seem too worried about Agent Holst going after anyone.”

“That’s because there isn’t anyone,” Adelaide says softly, not looking at Houdini but down towards the floor. She clears her throat and lifts her chin to stare forward and then glance to Houdini.

“You mentioned a husband once,” Houdini says, dropping his grip from her arm.

“Benjamin is— My husband is dead,” Adelaide informs him and Houdini opens his mouth to say something but then closes it when nothing comes out. He’d always assumed that she had just been an exceptionally insulated person and never figured that her silence on the matter of her personal life was not out of a sense of wanting privacy but out of tragedy.

“I’m sorry,” Houdini says finally. “What happened?” He can’t help himself. Adelaide furrows her brow.

“I don’t think now is really the time,” she says, shutting him down.

“Yeah,” Houdini says, “I guess you’re right.” Adelaide finishes opening the front door and they’re just about to walk out when they hear from behind them:

“Good luck.” Nan is standing in the foyer, looking somehow surprisingly small, surrounded once again by an empty house. Adelaide nods at her, Houdini gives her a short wave and she returns it, her metal hand raised in the air.

 

. . . .

 

It takes an hour and a half to get to the hotel that Houdini had been staying at before he was dragged off to the shuttle and he has Adelaide park out front, just for a few minutes as he stares up at the building—at the floor that he and his mother had been on—and thinks. It’s that strange in-between time where it’s still mostly dark outside but the sky is almost a purple sort of grey, a dull haze settling over the buildings as lights start to come on—early risers already getting ready for the day ahead or people who never slept much in the first place. A woman jogs past, her long hair pulled up and swishing almost hypnotizingly as she moves and Houdini watches her, surprised that there were still people out there who tried to exercise outside.

“Houdini,” Adelaide says, grabbing his attention and he turns to look at her. She’s leaning slightly closer to the steering wheel, both hands clutching it and, in the weak light, Houdini can still see the sticky places where his blood had dried. “You do know we’re not there yet, right?”

“I know.” Houdini points up ahead at a stoplight. “You’ll have to make a left up there.”

“Okay,” Adelaide says, flicks on the turn signal, pulling back out into traffic. The female jogger is now going back the other way, having reached the corner and turned around. Houdini thinks he can see her give him a salute as they roll past but he closes his eyes briefly, shakes his head. He must have imagined it.

 

. . . .

 

Houdini gets them turned around three times along the way and, by the time they’re on the right road, the sun has risen, the trees on either side of them black and gold in the shadows. The facility is isolated, the first and only thing you saw when turning off the highway onto the exit as if it had been specially built there just for them and nobody else. The street stretches off into the distance on either side, pulling down a sharp curve to the left and a slight hill on the right and Adelaide stops at the fork, the two of them staring at the towering block of white stone and chrome looming ahead. They can afford to wait there, no vehicle honking at them to make up their mind, because they had been the only ones to make the turn and, for a moment, Houdini wonders if he and Adelaide were the only ones who could see it. (It’s stupid, figures it’s only the thought of a tired mind so packed with worry and agitation that logic had to find itself a small corner to hide in.)

A heavy iron gate separates them from the perfectly manicured lawn, the smooth walkway leading to the glass front doors, and Houdini counts at least ten guards in the front alone. If they notice their vehicle just sitting there, watching them, they don’t seem to care or perceive them as any kind of threat and Adelaide decides waiting wasn’t helping, takes her foot off the brake and decides to go left, stops the car in a spot where they could still see part of the building but, hopefully, nobody would be able to see them. She shuts off the engine, fingers drumming on the steering wheel.

“There are at least twelve guards,” Adelaide says. “And that’s just _outside_. Who knows how many there could be indoors. We definitely aren’t getting in through the front. Not unnoticed, anyway.” She peers out at the woods surrounding them. “I suppose we could get out, go through the trees, try to scout out a back entrance. What do you think?”

“Sure,” Houdini says, unbuckling his seatbelt and opening the passenger side door to climb out, a warm breeze swirling through his hair, brushing over his face. It’s surprisingly quiet outside, the only sounds the faint rushing noise of fast cars just on the other side of the trees, shaking leaves and the quick slam of Adelaide’s door as she exits the car to join him outside. The truth was that Houdini wasn’t particularly hopeful that any back door they managed to stumble upon would be any less heavily guarded than the front. The fence wouldn’t stop halfway around the building and, sure, there may be less guards but something far more lethal could be waiting for them instead and that didn’t even include the likelihood of there being cameras.

He was sure that Adelaide had considered this as well, wants to ask her why they’re even trying, why she suggested it when they both knew—short of climbing the walls or digging a tunnel underneath the building like rodents—their chances of getting inside undetected (and remaining that way) were near impossible. He already knows what he’s going to have to do and he hopes that whatever look is pulled across his face doesn’t completely give it away.

They walk into the trees, feet soft on dead leaves and broken twigs, pale mushrooms reaching up from the dark, earthy soil, twists of green, untamed vines curling up bark and branches. They can see the iron fence, the even planes of the building, the tinted windows and Adelaide hesitates when she realizes that Houdini is no longer following.

“What is it?” Adelaide asks. _There was no way. This isn’t going to work. There’s only one way to do this._ “Harry, what’s wrong?”

“Addie,” Houdini says, taking a few steps closer, “I’m really sorry. You can get me back for this later, I promise.”

“Get you back for wh—” Adelaide starts to ask but Houdini doesn’t let her finish, reels his arm back to sucker punch her in the side of the head. Stunned, she loses her balance and topples over onto the leaves and Houdini turns to run back towards the front of the building, bursting into the pale morning as he moves down the road.

“Hey!” Houdini shouts, stands on the other side of the iron gate, waves his arms at the guards to get their attention. “Hey, assholes! Look who’s back from the dead!” The gate opens seemingly on it’s own and he strides through it, arms out as if he’s greeting family he hadn’t seen in years, stops when the guards rush him, black guns with long barrels pointed at him from every direction. They shout at him to get down, _get down dammit, on your knees_ and Houdini replies, puts his hands behind his head even though they didn’t tell him to and he smiles up at their faces, obscured behind sunglasses and masks. “Didn’t anyone tell you that you can’t kill a ghost?”

“Yes,” says a voice behind the crowd surrounding him and they part, keep their guns trained on him, and Agent Holst is walking towards them, shoes clicking against the ground. She stops in front of him, hands on her hips. “But I’m fairly certain you can knock one out.”

The jolt comes from somewhere to his right, jammed into his side and he falls forward, body going stiff.

 

. . . .

 

Houdini can feel himself being dragged along a corridor and then propped up in an elevator but his head is like oatmeal, his vision spotty and doubled when he can actually see and he wonders what they had really hit him with out there. His skin is numb but he feels something wet on his lips and he can’t decided which would be less humiliating: drool or blood, but he doesn’t have much of chance to think about it for very long because the elevator doors open and then there’s another jolt of agony and everything goes black, his eyes still wide open, his head static and cotton.

When everything clears, he finds himself sitting in a hard chair in a large office with huge windows that looked, not out towards the road they had driven on to approach the building, but to the woods out behind it. The desk is enormous, dark polished wood shining under bright white lights that hung high on the ceiling, three computer displays on the smooth surface, angled away from his gaze, and there’s an immense sculpture in one of the corners, an indistinguishable shape of curved edges and reaching arms that somehow reminds Houdini of the sludge and he wonders briefly if Agent Holst had that before or if she had found it specifically for herself after as a joke.

He jumps when a body steps into his line of sight and he tries to lift his suddenly aching head but the person does him the favor of crouching down to his level and Agent Holst smiles at him, pushing her glasses further up on her nose with the pad of her thumb.

“There he is,” Holst says. “We had to jab you again once we got you off the elevator. You were fighting back. Couldn’t have that, could we?” Houdini doesn’t remember doing that and, by the look that flickers across her face, she knows that she’s blatantly lying to his face and enjoying it. “Your friends were worried. Thought we might have killed you at first. But see?” She says, turns to look next to Houdini and this is the first time he’s noticed he wasn’t alone: Doyle is seated beside him, Six on Doyle’s other side. Neither of them—Houdini included, he realizes as he tries to sit up straighter—are bound but they aren’t attempting to go anywhere. Probably had to do with the armed guards lining the walls behind them, Houdini thinks, glancing over his shoulder. “He’s fine. Mostly,” Holst says, pats Houdini on the cheek and stands up.

Houdini stares at the other two but only Doyle looks back. Other than fear pulling around the edges of his eyes, he appears completely unharmed. What had Holst been doing with them since they were taken just a few hours ago? Waiting? For what? Did Six sell them out, tell them that both Houdini and Adelaide were still out there? It was possible, although Houdini was surprised to even see it sitting with them if that were the case, especially if Holst knew there was sludge sloshing around under that human skin.

“I’d say the ‘gang’s all here’ but we know that isn’t true. Anybody want to tell us where your friend, Miss Stratton, is?”

“Not with us,” Houdini chances, his voice hoarse and he clears his throat. “Where’s my mother?” Might as well ask it now because Houdini has a feeling that things might just be getting worse from here on out.

“Alive,” Holst says, waving her hand. “She’s here. Somewhere. I don’t remember where we put her. Now, when you say ‘not with you’ does that mean Miss Stratton is dead or just… not _with_ you?” Holst asks. “What’d she do, leave you boys behind to have her own adventures?” Houdini opens his mouth to answer but Holst stops him, puts up a hand. “Nevermind. I don’t really care. I’m _far_ more interested in how the hell you managed to survive an explosion and make it home. Well, I know how you made it home,” Holst says and Houdini grimaces. This is the most Houdini has heard her speak since he’s met her. It’s more unnerving than her usual clipped sentences and one-word answers. “You hitched a ride with your buddies on the _Pelican_.” Houdini swallows, can feel his stomach tighten, glances over at Doyle, who shifts nervously in his seat. “But we’ll get to that later. So how’d you do it? I know it wasn’t on the shuttle because they left you behind, told me you were dead. They’re still not expected back here for another few days and I know there’s no _possible_ way they could get here early. So…?” She holds her hands out towards the three of them, inviting them to fill her in on the story but nobody speaks. “Really?” She exhales slowly through her teeth. “All I can come up with is that you had another ship following the shuttle that picked you up off the _Ragazzino_ before it blew up. Was that it, then?”

“It wasn’t,” Doyle says. “How would we be able to pull that off?”

“Might not have been you,” Holst says, gestures to Six. “I know Kirby was getting all cozy with you. May have felt bad, tried to save you. Is that what happened, Kirby?” Holst asks Six and Houdini does his best to quash down the surprise he can feel wanting to pull across his face. _She doesn’t know. How does she not know?_

“Sure,” Six says. “I saved them with my ship.” It's spent too much time with humans, Houdini figures. Six is doing an unsettlingly decent job at sounding relatively normal, using more casual words instead of its usual bland ‘yes’ and ‘no’. There’s still practically no emotion behind what it says, though, and Houdini hopes that Holst doesn’t find it strange. What Six says is exactly true but Holst laughs.

“Sarcasm,” Holst says. “I like it.” _She’s awful at reading people_ , Houdini thinks, _if she thought the monotone of an alien still trying to figure out how to pretend to be human was sarcasm_. “Won’t do anything to help you, though,” Holst shrugs, walks around to the other side of her desk and bends down to lift something from behind it, down by where her feet would have been if she was sitting there, and draws up a wooden baseball bat, resting it over her shoulder as she moves back to where she had been standing before. “Shooting someone is definitely faster,” she explains, “But I’ve found that a good beating not only helps release pent-up anger from the person with the bat, but it does a much better job of teaching everyone else a lesson.” She moves closer to where Six is sitting, lifts the bat from her shoulders and holds it straight out in front of her, level with Six’s temple. “Unfortunately, I have so much more on my plate right now, I just don’t have the time. So this will have to do.” She reels her arms back, brings the bat further away and it brushes the side of Doyle’s head and Doyle closes his eyes. Houdini thinks about doing something, about tackling her to the ground, but he knows it would end up with him—and possibly the other two as well—getting shot. “I’m very disappointed in you, Kirby.”

She slams the bat into the side of Six’s head.

The crack echoes throughout the room and Six barely makes a noise as it collapses sideways onto the carpeted floor. Houdini waits for the sludge to evacuate itself from the body, puddle on the ground, sliding and searching for a new host but nothing happens. _Kirby’s dead_ , Houdini thinks. _He has to be dead_. There’s no possible way he could survive both a broken neck and a fractured skull. Houdini leans forward, stares at the body, but he can’t see the rise and fall of a chest still breathing. _He’s dead_. He feels a weird acid in his throat and swallows it back, checks on Doyle who is staring pointedly forward, his hands trembling in his lap.

“Treason,” Holst says, dropping the bat on the floor. “I hate it.”

“Treason?” Houdini cries out, confused by her justification, and Holst narrows her eyes at him.

“Government,” she says, gestures to herself and then towards Houdini and Doyle. “Enemy. Now that that’s out of the way…” She brushes her hands together and goes back to the desk, turning one of the computers in their direction, a crisp and clean live stream from a camera perched in a high ceiling corner displayed on the screen and it takes Houdini a moment to recognize it but, when he does, he feels his heart drop to his stomach. “The _Pelican_ ,” Holst says, just in case they didn’t get it, taps a finger against the screen. “We put one of our people on board the minute they dropped you off last month. They’ve been there ever since. Luckily, none of the crew seemed to believe you when you apparently babbled on about the sludge so there was nothing to worry about. I was even going to get my guy off there the next time they came back to Earth. Yesterday, to be exact. But then they picked you up and you told them what happened. I don’t know _what_ you told them exactly since it was apparently a private meeting but I know Captain Bradshaw and all his little crew believed whatever you said this time. I mean, how could they not after hearing about you being dead but also somehow sitting on their ship, alive and well?” She sighs, turns the screen towards her to stare at it and then turns it back to the others. “I was really hoping you wouldn’t have gotten them involved. I really hate that I have to do this.”

Agent Holst picks up a phone from her desk and swipes her finger across the screen, holds it to her ear, tells whoever was on the other end to hang on and then swipes again, putting the device in her palm, holding it out in Houdini and Doyle’s direction.

“I want you to hear this,” Holst says to them quietly and then raises her voice. “You still there?”

“Yes, ma’am,” says the voice on the other end of the line. Houdini strains to try and figure out if he recognizes it but it’s too garbled, too muffled by interference. Whatever this person is using to talk to Holst, it definitely wasn’t the system Gardner had built for the crew.

“As well as putting one of my men on board,” Holst explains to them, “I also had him plant explosives all over the ship.” Houdini stands up, fists clenched even though it hurt and he takes a step forward, hears the sound of at least six guns readying to fire into his back and he stops, thinks about going anyway. Then again, he’s not sure what he could do if he succeeded in reaching Holst. Houdini could tell the person not to do it, beg at them, but he could go through with it anyway. It wouldn’t matter. Nothing he could do right now would matter. He couldn’t stop her and he couldn’t warn them. “Just remember,” Holst says, her expression horribly calm. “This is your fault.” She looks back to the phone. “Execute.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the voice repeats and leaves the line open.

There’s almost an entire minute of silence, nothing but the soft background noise of the _Pelican_ crew going about their day and then Houdini watches as the screen fills with smoke and fire, the phone nearly shattering with the sound of the explosions. He hears three seconds of screaming and then both the phone and camera go dead.

Houdini stumbles backwards, his balance gone, and lands hard on his chair, his limbs limp, his head spinning. _This can’t be real, none of this can be real_. He’s going to wake up back on the shuttle or in his bed, this entire experience just another one of his nightmares. He closes his eyes, squeezes them so tight he thinks his eyelids might tear and then opens them again but he’s still there in Holst’s office. He glances at Doyle, at his ghost white face and the tears pooling in his eyes, his jaw clenched. He’s starting to get up now himself, rising from his chair but Houdini puts a hand out, touches his arm to stop him and Doyle surprises Houdini by sitting back down.

“Well,” Holst says, “I have a lot more to do today so I think I’ll leave you two here to think about what just happened, give you some privacy. I won’t even leave the guards in here,” she says, walking towards the door. “They’ll be right outside, though, so no funny business.” She waggles her finger at them. “Not that there’s really any trouble you can cause in here. This isn’t even my real office.” A sigh. “I’ll come check in on you later once I figure out what to do with you.”

Houdini hears the sound of a door opening, of feet marching out into the hallway and then the click of a lock. They’re finally alone and Houdini stands up, picks up his chair, and throws it across the room.

“Our fault,” he hears Doyle say. “That was—”

“No,” Houdini shoots back, walks over to him and grabs either side of his face, holding it in his hands, forcing Doyle to look at him. “That was _not_ our fault. That was her. _She_ did that. She… she…” But he can’t say it. Doyle blinks at him, looks as if he’s going to say something but they freeze when they hear a gurgle from the floor where Kirby’s body still lay. They both look over to where the body is, then at each other, before Houdini lets go of Doyle’s face and cautiously walks over, staring down at it before taking a step back. “Holy shit. It’s still alive.”

“What?” Doyle asks, standing up and going over to join Houdini. Six lies there, the side of its head bloody and broken but then it blinks slowly, its hand moving slightly and it makes another noise. “Good lord.”

“Guess that kind of disproves your whole ‘can only surviving in warm, living bodies’ theory,” Houdini says, watches as Doyle crouches down to put a hand on Six’s shoulder and it barely reacts other than to move its eyes towards where Doyle was hovering over it.

“I don’t think it can hear us,” Doyle says. “Where it was hit…” Doyle points to the head, gestures at the injury. “That part of the brain, if I remember correctly, deals with the auditory senses. Somesthetic, as well, most likely.”

“Somes—what?” Houdini asks.

“Touch. Pain. Temperature.”

“You touched its shoulder,” Houdini says. “It looked at you.”

“Coincidence most likely. It may have seen my shadow,” Doyle says. “Here.” He reaches his arms down and helps Six sit up and it sways, lists to the side, tilts its head as it attempts to look around. Foamy blood and saliva bubble at the corner of its mouth. Doyle waves his hand in front of its face and it blinks at him, clicks sluggishly. “Six. Can you hear me?” Six sways its head from side-to-side gently as if trying to carefully dislodge something. “Do you feel this?” Doyle asks, picks up Six’s arm by the wrist, holds it up and Six stares at it, blinks again, tries to shake its head.

“Hey, buddy,” Houdini says, hates how the friendly term slips out, hates even more how his stomach is churning with what he realizes is concern and anger at what he was staring at as he dropped down, propped on his knees, to join the two of them on the floor. “Can you talk?” Six watches Houdini’s mouth move as if trying to read his lips but it doesn’t know enough about the human language still to be able to figure out the words without sound.

“No?” It tries, seems to assume that whatever Houdini had asked him needed a negative as a response. Doyle gets up suddenly, walks over to the desk and Houdini sees him hesitate, his gaze flickering to the screen with static and white lines, the words ‘CAMERA OFFLINE’ flashing with white block letters (Houdini feels his face get hot, his fists clenching, his skin crawling. _She blew it up_ , says a voice in his head, _she killed them_ ) but then he snaps back, makes himself look away and walks to the other side, moving things around, opening drawers and returning with an actual pad of paper and a pen. Doyle sits back down, starts to write something in clean, printed uppercase letters.

“Do we even know if it can read that? Or if it can even _read_?” Houdini asks and Doyle pauses, glances at Six and then back down at the page.

“I suppose we’ll find out,” Doyle says, and turns the pad towards Six.

 _CAN YOU SPEAK?_ Doyle had written and Houdini knows it can—they both heard it say ‘no’ only moments before—but Houdini also figures there really isn’t much else to ask it right now until they can get some idea of what else they’re dealing with.

“Yes,” Six says and then looks sincerely confused, lifts its hand to touch at an ear but looks even more baffled after that. Can’t hear itself, can’t feel itself either. Houdini thinks he can almost detect panic in those eyes. They’re the first human expressions that Houdini has ever seen from it. Doyle turns the pad of paper back to himself, writes for a moment and flips it back towards Six.

 _YOU’VE LOST YOUR HEARING. YOUR SENSE OF TOUCH._ Doyle points to the side of his own head, refers to where Holst had whacked Six. He writes something else. _TRY SPEAKING A LONGER SENTENCE._

“What. Happened. After I was. Hurt?” It’s speaking more like its kind did when it had control over the AI: stilted, awkward pauses between the wrong words, searching for the right vocabulary. Doyle starts to write but then stops, pen hanging over the paper. He crosses out something and then writes two straightforward words instead. _PELICAN DESTROYED._ Six clicks, blinks gradually, one eye closing and opening before the next. There’s more blood and saliva, as if it’s already fading, as if they’re losing it. Houdini thinks that maybe it doesn’t understand what that means but then it says: “My. Ship?” Doyle shakes his head.

“We have to try and get out of here,” Houdini says suddenly, stands up because he can’t sit there and watch this anymore.

“You heard her,” Doyle says, “We can’t. Even if you could pick the lock, there are guards right outside the door.”

“She could have just said that,” Houdini says, walks the perimeter of the room, leans on the walls, picks up the chair he had thrown earlier and tries to break the windows but there’s barely a chip in the glass and the impact leaves his arms vibrating for a few seconds. “Trying to scare us.”

“Well, it worked,” Doyle says. “We’d be better off coming up with a plan for when she comes back.”

“ _If_ she comes back,” Houdini says. Maybe she never would. Maybe she left them to starve, to rot away in here. The world already thinks Houdini is dead and Doyle would probably be next anyway. He looks up at the ceiling. The material appears relatively cheap, but it’s too far away to reach by standing on something and the chair was too heavy to be thrown straight up in the air. Even if he _could_ break it, there was no guarantee it could support his weight or would lead to anywhere useful and he can’t spot a single vent anywhere that might be big enough to crawl through. Doyle wasn’t exactly wrong; they were better off trying to figure out a way to ambush her if she ever showed up again. It was too bad he slipped the stun gun Gardner gave him into Adelaide’s jacket pocket. They really could have used it right now, provided the people who dragged him in here hadn’t confiscated it if they had managed to find Adelaide.

“How did you get taken by them?” Doyle asks.

“Walked right up to the front gate. Gave myself up.”

“Of course,” Doyle says. “And Adelaide?” Houdini shrugs.

“What about you?” Houdini asks. “What happened?”

“I went out to find Six. It was sitting on the lawn, just staring up at the sky. I went to talk to him when a large vehicle pulled up in the front of the house. It all happened so fast… There were so many…” His eyes seem to be focused somewhere else, remembering, but he comes back into the room and sighs. “They brought us here and they—” He pauses, looks away from Houdini.

“They what?”

“It was unpleasant,” Doyle says and then remains quiet, signaling the end of the conversation. He peers around the room from his spot on the floor, frowning, turns back to Six who seemed to have zoned out but he gets its attention, motions for him to try and stand on its own which Six attempts, following Doyle’s movements and actually manages to get to its feet and take a few steps on its own before losing its balance. Doyle directs Six to a chair and Six sits down heavily.

“It was sort of our fault, wasn’t it?” Doyle asks after an extended moment of silence.

“Doyle, stop—”

“We got them involved. If we hadn’t—”

“We had no idea there was one of her people on board, no idea there were explosives. How could we?” Houdini replies. “If we had known but asked for their help anyway then, yeah, okay. It was our fault. But we didn’t. The only person who’s to blame is Agent Holst. She just said that to mess with us. Don’t let her win.”

“Don’t let her win?” Doyle repeats. “I think she already has.”

Houdini wants to argue but he can’t because he’s too afraid that Doyle was right.

 

. . . .

 

Houdini isn’t entirely sure how long they had been trapped in that room. The windows made it difficult to tell the time of day and there were no clocks to be seen anywhere around them. It could have been thirty minutes or six hours. Nobody had spoken during that time, the only sound the faint buzzing from the lights and their feet as they moved around the room, the two of them breathing and numerous times Houdini’s brain yelled at him that Six _wasn’t breathing, its dead, its gone now, too_ before he reminded himself that it stopped breathing as soon as that bat collided with the side of its head. Houdini had a lot of questions for it but no easy way to get answers. Of course, right when he _actually_ wanted to have another conversation with it, he couldn’t.

Doyle kept checking on it but Houdini wasn’t sure what he was expecting to find had changed. Houdini figures that, as long as the sludge was still in there, the body would remain as alive as it could be considering its brains had been scrambled and its neck was still broken. Six looked like a nightmare: red with blood, bruised, still dripping foam and pink-tinged saliva and Houdini couldn’t even do it a favor by putting it out of its misery.

Houdini is considering trying to break the windows again just for something to do or maybe he just hadn’t tried hard enough and he has his hands on the chair when he hears the _thud, thud, thud_ of bodies falling out in the hallway. Doyle hears it too, because he’s staring at the door, brow furrowed and he backs away towards the desk, realizes that Six isn’t coming with him and goes back to help him up, leading it over to stand with Houdini. The door handle jiggles, shakes frantically and then stops, moves again and, finally, the door bursts open to reveal Adelaide and Gardner standing on the other side.

“Oh my god,” Adelaide breaths a sigh of relief, puts a hand to her face and then walks into the room, Gardner following. Before they close the door behind them, Houdini can see the guards all passed out on the floor. “Oh god,” she reiterates when she sees Six. “What happened?”

“A baseball bat,” Houdini says, staring, not at Adelaide, but at Gardner. “You’re here. How are you—” _You’re supposed to be dead. Could this mean…?_

“Yeah. Captain told me to stay behind. Figured you could use a friend on the surface. I’ll probably lose my job for ditching if Frontier Works finds out but screw ‘em,” Gardner says, smiles lightly. “I decided to keep my distance for awhile, though. Besides, you guys tore outta there before I could catch up.”

“How’d you find us?” Houdini asks.

“I… uh… may have put a GPS tracker in that stun gun I gave you and ‘forgot’ to mention it,” Gardner says, still smiling but then it falters when he notices the looks on both Houdini and Doyle’s faces as they gaze at him. “What’s up? Why’re you guys looking at me like that?”

“She blew it up,” Doyle says weakly. “The ship—”

“Yes,” Adelaide says. “We know. Agent Holst blew up the _Ragazzino_.” She doesn’t get it, she’s looking at them like she doesn’t understand why they’re telling her something she already knows.

“Not…” Houdini starts, swallows, tries again. “Not that ship. The _Pelican_. She— She blew— She blew it up,” Houdini says quietly, avoiding eye contact with Gardner. Adelaide’s eyes go wide and she shakes her head, peers at them as if begging them to tell her they were playing some horrendously cruel joke.

“No,” Gardner says, moves away from them, hands up. “You’re lying.”

“I’m sorry,” Doyle says.

“You’re— I mean, this can’t—” Gardner turns away, hands on his head, moves in a small circle and then bends over, has trouble catching his breath and then stands straight again.

“We wouldn’t lie to you about something like that,” Doyle says, apologizes again and Gardner finds a way to a small trash can beside the desk, leaning over to throw up into it. When he finishes, he walks, dazed, over to one of the chairs and sits, puts his head in his hands.

“Are you sure?” Adelaide asks and Houdini nods, looks away.

“She made us watch.”

“She’d been planning it since they picked us up off the _Ark_ ,” Doyle says. “She only did it because we— She wasn’t going to but we told them about the other ship, about the sludge. About Harry not being dead. She only did it because they helped us.”

“So it was your fault,” Gardner says from where he was sitting and he lifts his head, glares at them before standing, pointing a finger aggressively in their direction as he advances upon the four of them. “If Bradshaw hadn’t agreed to pick you up, if you had just kept your big mouths shut when he did…” He’s shouting, his hand curling into a fist and Houdini is prepared to jump in between him and his friends, to take whatever blows are coming their way, but Adelaide does it instead, lifts her hands up to put an invisible wall between her and Doyle, who had been the closest target to Gardner’s fury.

“Marcus, stop! Stop.” He actually does, breathing heavily through his nose, fingers still bent into fists waiting to strike something. “We didn’t know! How could we know— You’re angry. You’re upset. So are we. But you’re directing your rage at the wrong people. The person who tried to kill us, who killed _your friends_ … She’s the one responsible for this. Don’t turn your back on us. Please.” Gardner stares at the four of them, focuses on each face for a few seconds and, slowly, his shoulders drop, defeated. Anything that anybody was going to say next is interrupted by leaden footsteps from out in the hall, accompanied by shouting, more guards finally on the way.

“What did you do to the others?” Houdini asks and Gardner pulls a small, square device from his pocket.

“This little guy,” Gardner says. “Knocks them out. But as with everything I seem to build, it’s not exactly made for long term use. I’d say its only got two or three more chances to work at this point.”

“We should use it while we have it,” Adelaide says. “I’ll go out in the hall and set it off, clear a path. The door we came in should still be open, we can—”

“No,” Houdini says. “My mother is still here. And I’m not leaving without finding Holst.”

“Forget her!” Adelaide yells, hesitates to look at Houdini apologetically. “I meant Holst, not your— We can come back. We’ll bring help. The whole building is looking for us, we’ll never—”

“I’ll stay then,” Houdini says. “I’ll turn on your device and then make a run for it, start searching. You guys get out.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Adelaide says. “You know I’ll stay.”

“Yeah,” Gardner says, face crumpling briefly before he continues. “It’s not like I have anywhere else to be.”

“Same here,” Doyle says.

“You have to get Six out of here. The guy can barely walk,” Houdini says but Six shakes its head.

“Stay,” it says. It may not have heard anything they said, but it must have understood the gist of the conversation anyway.

“Okay,” Houdini says. “Then let’s do this.” Adelaide nods, inhales deeply, takes the device from Gardner and then walks across the room, slips out of the door, closing it behind her. There’s more shouting and Gardner tells them to cover their ears, just in case, because it could get pretty loud and they do, Six not even bothering to try since it didn’t matter.

Houdini hears a faint whine through his hands and his head starts to hurt and then there’s silence. The door opens again and Adelaide is waving at them to hurry, her hand beckoning them over to her. The rest of them quickly join her and the five of them start to run down the hall towards the elevator as an alarm starts to scream.

 

. . . .

 

“Do you even have an idea where she might be?” Adelaide asks. They had gone down a couple floors and hit the emergency brake between two others to give themselves another few minutes of peace. As far as they knew, it would only be a matter of time before they were trapped again; a place like this not having protocols in place, not being able to take control of the elevators and make it go wherever they wanted didn’t seem unlikely but, for now, taking the stairs would be even more of a hassle. They would just have to cross that extraordinarily unstable bridge when they got to it. “Did Holst tell you anything specific? Anything at all?”

“Just that she was still alive and that she was in here somewhere,” Houdini says. “She told us she didn’t even remember herself.”

“You guys have been here before, right?” Gardner asks from where he’s standing in the corner. “How much of this place have you seen? I mean, it doesn’t look very big, all things considered. I think the _Peli_ —” He hesitates. “I’ve seen bigger ships.”

“It’s not as small as it looks,” Houdini tells him, staring at his blurry, obscured reflection in the elevator doors.

“The rooms,” Doyle says suddenly and everyone turns to look at him. “When we were first here, for those five weeks. They kept us below ground, in those rooms. If you wanted to hide someone, don’t you think that would be a perfect place?”

“Yeah,” Houdini says, walks up the panel to select the floor number but the options only go down to the lobby and he hits it out of frustration, the screen beeping at him, not understanding the command he hadn’t really given it. “There’s no button for it.”

“There has to be,” Adelaide says, coming up beside him. “How else could they get down there?” She starts messing around with the screen, fingers swiping quickly, taking in the options and information before finally finding a menu that listed access to the lower floors but, when she selects it, a single screen prompting a four digit code pops up. “Four numbers. There are _at least_ ten-thousand possible combinations. We’d be here for hours if the system doesn’t lock us out first. I’m relatively sure we don’t have that kind of time.”

“It’s probably too much to hope that it’s just ‘one, two, three, four’, right?” Houdini asks, tries it anyway and the screen flashes red, the image shaking and the numbers vanish. _Try again_. “Worth a shot.”

“Can you do something?” Adelaide glances over her shoulder at Gardner, who shrugs, palms out. She looks back at the panel, types in four numbers and there’s a pause before they’re faced with another warning, red screen and she makes a face, frowning slightly when Houdini furrows his brow, questioning. “Just a guess. I thought maybe we’d get lucky.”

“Us and luck are like oil and water,” Houdini says. “I thought you’d have that figured out by now.”

“Where are you going?” They hear Doyle ask and then Six is shuffling towards them, moving to the panel, tries to lift its arm and manages to raise it but when it goes to touch the screen it pulls back, stares at its hand, blinks, clicks and then tries again. Four numbers are punched in slowly, the last one locking into place and then they wait, the computer thinking before, surprisingly, it flashes green, offers them a list of three new floors to choose from.

_WELCOME, DANIEL KIRBY. PLEASE SELECT A FLOOR._

“I know. Somehow,” Six says sloppily, points to its head.

“Is there anything else about this place you remember that can help us?” Adelaide asks but Six just stares at her, says nothing, eyes narrowing very slightly.

“He can’t hear you,” Doyle says behind them. “The hit to the head…”

“Oh,” Adelaide says, puts a hand on Six’s arm and Six glances at it and then looks back to her.

“He can’t feel that, either,” Houdini says.

“Good lord,” Adelaide remarks, removes her hand. “Can we please choose a floor?”

“Absolutely,” Houdini says, disengaging the emergency brake and pressing the button for the bottom floor. The elevator lurches and Six nearly falls over. The lights flicker as if it’s about to shut down but, eventually, they start to descend.

 

. . . .

 

The doors _ding_ open pleasantly and they hesitate, all of them peering out and down a long, empty hallway. It’s as if the entire area had been evacuated like the five of them were horribly contagious and Houdini steps out first, cautious, but nobody jumps out at him, no weapons are shoved in his face and he hears the others following closely behind. Everything is white tile, chrome and glass, halls stretching wide, box-shaped rooms with computers, servers, display screens as wide as the walls they hung on and scientific equipment Houdini could never even begin to try and name. It was all deserted, some of the equipment still running, liquid in pale shades bubbling and coughing smoke, machines beeping and wailing. Something smells sour, is joined by the stench of rot, curves of bleach and cleaning chemicals around the edges of the cool air pumping in from small vents in the ceiling.

“What the hell are they doing down here?” Gardner asks and they stop in the center of floor, where four paths set around them in different directions, all of them leading to similar glass rooms with more equipment and abandoned experiments. “And where is everyone? I thought there’d be guards everywhere, at least.”

“She’s toying with us,” Doyle says, “Like a cat playing with its prey before it eats it. She’s letting us run around and explore because she knows we won’t be getting out of here alive.”

“I guess we all know how Doyle likes to see his glass of water,” Houdini says but he can’t seem to shake the feeling that this was, to some degree, incredibly bizarre. Why would she take them but not tie them up, not make a big deal out of one of their group being missing? Why send guards but not do anything about the elevator? It’s as if she wanted to give them a boost of adrenaline, to make them panic but think they’re making progress only to pull the rug from under their feet at any moment. Then again, she thought Six was still Kirby and believed she had killed him. There was no way she could have predicted that there was really sludge sloshing around under that skin and that it would be able to retain a few scattered memories of its host.

Or she knew everything and was, like Doyle said, playing with her food.

“As truly fascinating as all of this is,” Adelaide says, “I don’t think Houdini’s mother is down here.”

“Agreed,” Houdini says and they turn around, Houdini’s heart briefly speeding up as he almost expects to find an army of guns waiting for the group to notice them standing there but there’s nothing except the empty hallway they had come down only moments earlier.

 

. . . .

 

The floor above is nearly identical to the one they just left except, this time, the glass rooms have nothing more than a bed, a small table, a single chair and Houdini closes his eyes, flashes back to the five weeks after the _Royal_ , to the days spent locked away in one of those rooms, only let out to be poked and prodded and interrogated. It was deathly silent in there—not even the slightest hiss of air through non-existent cracks in the seams and corners could be heard—and the two-way mirror that the walls really were blocked him from seeing outside. Houdini remembers talking to himself, humming songs he hadn’t sung since he was a child, whispering prayers in Hebrew to keep his mind busy. He had purposely put himself into small spaces—into prisons and solitary confinement—for the sake of a stunt, but he always knew when he was getting out, always knew how.

That time, though, there had been no assurances of an escape or being released and Houdini had been left after awhile wondering if he was going to be trapped in this building—in that room—for the rest of his life. It was no wonder that he signed whatever papers that Holst had dropped in front of him. By that point, he was so desperate for open spaces and fresh air that he would have signed an agreement that Holst could come slice his throat at some point next year and he wouldn’t fight back. For all he knew, he had signed something that let her blow them up without consequence.

There doesn’t seem to be anybody here, either. Houdini almost expected to see each room with a person, each with somebody being imprisoned or tested on but they don’t seem to have been even opened since Houdini, Adelaide, and Doyle had been encased in there. The bright lights pushed into the ceiling in rows flicker and snap, blinking like they’re attempting to talk to them in some special code that nobody present could understand.

“We split up,” Houdini says. “Shout if you find her.” No one agrees on who will go with whom and, with an uneven number, Doyle props Six up against one of the glass walls near the elevator, gestures for him to stay and then he and Adelaide go running off to the left, Houdini and Gardner taking the right.

“I’m sorry,” Gardner says as they walk. “About what I said. That it was your fault.”

“I keep telling Doyle that it isn’t but… Maybe you were right. Maybe we shouldn’t have gotten you involved,” Houdini says.

“No. We did the right thing, helping you. It… It might be my own guilt,” Gardner says, hesitating, thumbnail picking at the cuticle of his middle finger and Houdini stops, stares at him and waits. “Shortly after you guys left, once we were back just outside of orbit… I found something suspicious buried under the piles of scrap metal and electronics I kept in a room. I didn’t remember putting it there and I was bringing it to Bradshaw but then one of the engineers, a new guy—Pollard, I think—saw me with it, told me it was just an old, busted part off the engine. He replaced it before we left, thought I could use it. It seemed… it seemed fine. I just put it back in the pile.” He pauses, looks away, studies one of the empty beds with its metal frame and thin mattress. “I think it may have been an explosive.” Gardner breaths out a sigh. “I never brought it up to Bradshaw. I forgot all about it.”

“It could’ve—” Houdini starts but Gardner shakes his head.

“That engineer… He was so quick to stop me, to explain it. He just showed up, had the job. We didn’t even need a new engineer. Nobody questioned it. Maybe they should have.”

“It’s nobody’s fault but Agent Holst’s,” Houdini says. If there was one thing he could hold onto right now, one determined conviction, it was that. What happened to the _Pelican_ was all on her. Her and the people she worked for and the people who worked for her. Even simply suggesting those words, planting them in their brains, was enough to make someone start doubting themselves, question every action and sentence spoken leading up until that point. It was enough to make them forget that the real person to blame was usually one who was trying to shift that blame onto somebody else.

“Is it, though?” Gardner asks softly and Houdini starts to answer when he hears Adelaide’s voice, looks over Gardner’s shoulder to see her waving her arms at them from a ways down the hallway she and Doyle had gone down and Houdini runs towards her, letting her lead him around a corner to a glass-walled room where his mother sat in a chair, staring mournfully at—to what appeared to be to her—a mirror that showed her nothing but the empty space around her. Houdini goes to bang on the glass but then stops. Even if she _did_ hear it, it would do nothing but scare her. He tries the door instead but it won’t budge and there’s no panel, no little box to input a code, no lock to slip in a key or a badge.

“How the heck did they get us out of these things?” Houdini asks, tries the door again, leans on it, pulls, but he gets nothing but a sore shoulder. He runs at it, the same way he had with Doyle’s door on the shuttle, forgets that he hadn’t want to make too much noise and frighten her, but he bounces clean off it and his mother doesn’t move, doesn’t react to the noise.

“It obviously can’t be broken,” Adelaide says. “There must be a computer or something around here that opens the doors. I’ll go see if I can find it.” She hurries away, her feet echoing as they slam against the hard floor and, even further away, they can still hear her moving, maneuvering through the halls, sliding past vacant rooms. There’s silence then, a moment of calm. Either she found something or somebody had gotten her.

Houdini keeps his focus on his mother. She looks exhausted, her hair frizzy and unkempt and she’s dressed in generic clothes that Holst must have provided her with when she was brought here. She doesn’t look injured—at least, not physically. _This is too easy_ , says a voice in the back of his head, whispering, _Too easy_. Doyle says something about going to find Adelaide because she’s been quiet for far too long but then there’s a deep buzzing noise and every single door to every room pops open at once. Houdini’s mother startles, goes white as a sheet when she sees Houdini come rushing in and she stands, her hands to her face.

“Ghost,” she says, shakes her head, covers her eyes and then looks again but he’s still there, walking closer to her and she reaches out once he’s right in front of her, cautiously touches his cheek, pulls away as if burned and then touches him again.

“Not a ghost, Ma,” Houdini says.

“They said you were dead,” his mother cries, wraps her arms around him, squeezing, and he returns the hug, presses his face to her shoulder. “It was all over the news.”

“They lied. They were lied to,” Houdini corrects himself.

“Your manager… he told me some woman from the government wanted to talk to me. He checked me out. I went with them because I thought— She brought me here, took my clothes, locked me away. Said it was for my own good. She kept asking me questions, wanting to know if I knew about what happened on that ship, if you had told me anything. I didn’t understand—” She stops talking, steps back but keeps her fingers on him, hands holding his arms, eyes wet.

“We came for you. We came back to get you out of here,” Houdini says, leads her out of the room to where the others are waiting and she looks at all of them one by one, gaze lingering longer on Adelaide and Doyle.

“Your friends? From the _Ark Royal_. Mister Conan Doyle and Miss Stratton,” she says and they offer her the best smiles they can manage. She glances, then, to Gardner. “Who is this?”

“Marcus Gardner, ma’am,” Gardner says.

“He’s a friend, too,” Houdini says and Gardner almost looks pleasantly surprised to hear him say it, as if he thought he still had to work a bit further to reach that status to them, as if him being here at all wasn’t good enough. “There’s an elevator down here. We’re going to get you out of this place. Gardner is going to take you to Doyle’s house. We have a car.” He hadn’t discussed this with anyone and he lets an expression settle on his face that dares them to argue, which none of them does.

“Oh my,” Houdini’s mother exclaims when she sees the state that Six is in, barely standing on exhausted legs, his head broken and still bleeding, his mouth leaking, dripping on to his shirt, his gaze unfocused as he stares at nothing in particular. Doyle goes over, stands in front of him and Six comes back slowly, blinking at the figures that had suddenly appeared, tilting its head slightly when it sees the new addition to the group. “Is he—?”

“For now,” Houdini answers before she could finish the question. _Is he alright_? Houdini looks to Doyle, asks it himself without actually speaking and Doyle shakes his head. _The body may already be dead, but we’re still losing it._ He has no idea what the sludge is actually doing in there, wouldn’t know without asking. It was enough to keep the body together with broken limbs, to keep it moving and talking with a scrambled brain, but it obviously couldn’t repair ruined tissue, could only keep it working for a little while longer as it gradually breaks down.

 

. . . .

 

They create a wall in front of Houdini’s mother in the elevator when they reach the top levels, stop at the lobby, at the floor where the door was that Adelaide and Gardner had entered, make it so if people start firing they’d be the hit first but, when the doors slide open, it’s almost much worse than just being slaughtered: Agent Holst is standing, waiting for them, arms crossed over her chest, two armed men flanking her, guns pointed, not at them, but at the ground.

“So _that’s_ where I put her,” Holst says, as if she’s talking about her lost keys. “Thanks for finding her.”

“You’re not taking her back,” Houdini says.

“I’m not? That’s news to me. Although, really…” She taps her index finger to her lips, shrugs. “I don’t actually need her anymore after all. I don’t even recall why I took her in the first place. Orders from up top, most likely, those paranoid— Fine. I’ll make a deal, then. She can go.” But she doesn’t tell them the rest of the bargain she wants to make.

“And…?” Houdini prompts.

“Oh, don’t worry. I have plans for you. You and Mister Conan Doyle and Miss Stratton and whoever this man is and—” She pauses, finally notices the person she thought was Kirby leaning against Doyle. “And he’s still alive? Agent Kirby.” Holst tries to get Six’s attention, snaps her fingers but Six ignores her. “He’s not doing too well. I must not have swung hard enough.”

“I’ll stay,” Houdini’s mother says, moving up to speak over Houdini and Adelaide’s shoulders. “Please don’t kill them. I will stay.”

“Sorry,” Holst says. “But, like I said, I really don’t need you anymore. Your life isn’t worth the five of theirs unfortunately.” Houdini steps closer to Adelaide, blocking his mother from Holst’s view again and he bumps into Adelaide, the side of his hand brushing against a familiar, hard shape still tucked into her pocket. The stun gun. He slips it from her, palms it and coughs to cover up any noise that the movements might have made. “Well?” Holst says when nobody moves. “Go on, then.”

“He goes, too,” Houdini says, gestures to Gardner and Holst eyes him, frowning.

“Hmm,” she hums, taps a finger to cheek as she thinks. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

“I doubt it,” Gardner says. “I guess I just have one of those faces.”

“Guess so,” Holst says. “You being here means you must have some idea what’s going on but… you’re also just one guy. People don’t know you. You talk about this and they’ll think you’re just some conspiracy nut.” She’s thinking out loud to herself. “And I have a feeling you’re not going to leave until you think your friends here will get out so if I change my mind, I suppose I could always send one of my guys out to shoot you.” Holst shrugs dramatically, sighing. “Alright. Go ahead. Take the old lady and get out of here.” She gestures towards the direction of the lobby, moves her hand in a brushing motion in the air when they don’t move fast enough and Houdini watches them disappear around a corner, Gardner holding Houdini's mother by the hand as they run and Houdini feels his stomach clench, images of them turning a corner and being blown away by surprise gunshots—Holst laughing at their naivety—flashing like a grisly film through his head but he pushes it back, buries them. _They’ll make it. They have to make it._ No matter what happens after this, she has to make it out of here alive.

“See?” Holst says. “I can be nice. Now, as far as you four go… Well, don’t worry. As I said, I have a plan.”

Houdini touches the stun gun again. _Only two charges. Only two guards._ He’d have to be fast and, if he missed, that would be it; the thing would be good for nothing but to be used as a paperweight. He studies the two guards, trying to decide which one to go for first or if it even mattered. _Fuck it_ , he thinks, and lunges forward.

He hits the guard on the right directly in the neck, the device snapping bright white electricity, sizzling and crackling and the man shouts, his body tightening, shaking as he falls to the ground. The other guard is turning, gun lifting, everything briefly in slow motion as Houdini spins around, sees the finger on the trigger but he moves anyway stabs at him just as he hears Doyle call out “Hey!’ and, like an idiot, the guard turns to see where the noise came from and Houdini jams the device into the man’s face, watches him collapse just like his friend. A fist slams into the back of his head and he stumbles forward, regains his balance just in time for another hit and he feels another one coming but, when heturns around, he sees Adelaide grabbing at Holst, holding her, arms pulled behind her back as she struggled.

“You think it’s that easy?” Holst says through a clenched jaw. “You think you can just… do that? If the rest of the guards don’t hear from me every five minutes then this whole place will—”

Houdini walks up to her, pushes the device against her neck and presses the button, expecting nothing except to scare her, surprised when it sends a final, third jolt through her body and she passes out, limp, falling backwards against Adelaide.

“Look at that,” Houdini says. “Guess Gardner was wrong.”

“Drop her,” Adelaide says. “Let’s get out of here.”

“No,” Houdini says. “Not yet. We still haven’t gotten our answers.”

 

. . . .

 

They drag Holst into the elevator and Houdini presses the button for a specific floor. The elevator starts to climb, level by level, until they’re on the floor with the office that she had brought both Houdini and Doyle before. Adelaide plops her down unceremoniously in one of the chairs and Houdini leans over her, much in the same way that she had done when he first woke up. He slaps her face lightly and, eventually, she groans, eyes fluttering open as she lifts her head, peering around the room, trying to figure out where she is.

“There she is,” Houdini says, “I had to jab you by the elevator. You were fighting back. Couldn’t have that, could we?” He spits her own words back at her and she licks her lips, tries to sit up straighter, to stand, but Houdini puts his fingers against her forehead and pushes her back down.

“You’re in so much trouble,” Holst says, almost sing-song, her voice hoarse.

“Maybe,” Houdini says, shrugs. He walks over to the desk where Holst had put back her baseball bat and picks it up himself, inspects it, rests it on his shoulder. “Still doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of questions.”

“And what will you do if I don’t answer them?” Holst asks, eyes flickering to the bat in Houdini’s hands.

“Most likely nothing. I can put on a good show—anyone who’s seen me perform can tell you that. I can be intimidating, but I don’t think I could be as cruel as you and actually go through with swinging this thing around.”

“You don’t think you can be cruel?” Holst asks. “You spaced two-hundred-fifty people without much second thought. They were all still alive.”

“No they _weren’t_ ,” Houdini insists. “We did them a f—” He hesitates, takes in a breath. “I’m not explaining this to you. Not again. We did the right thing. That’s all we’ve tried to do.”

“How’s that going for you?” Holst inquires. “I may be the head honcho in here, but there are people way above me somewhere else. No matter what happens here today, they will find out and they won’t be happy. Who do you think made the decision to kill you? I was just the one they gave the order to.” She pauses, frowns, wrinkles her nose. “Forget it. You know what? Ask me whatever you want. This place may be shut down, we all might disappear, but you somehow manage to make it out of here, you’ll be on our ‘Wanted’ list for the rest of your lives. What’s the term? You may have won the battle but you’ll never win the war.” Houdini thinks he liked her better when she was at least apparently pretending to be professional, cold and disinterested. This sarcastic, rambly version of herself was still completely disconcerting.

“‘War’?” Doyle queries, almost laughing with disbelief. “What ‘war’? Who are we supposed to be fighting?”

“Have you heard of any alien discoveries before you got involved with the sludge? No? Because we hid it. We hid it all. It was mostly bacteria, plants, fungi. But they were alien and they were on Mars, they were out there on asteroids and meteors, they found their way here. Do you know how the public would react if they knew alien life really existed? Neither do we and we don’t ever want to find out.”

“What happened to ‘people are willing to believe a remarkable amount of impossible things’?” Adelaide asks from where she’s standing. Holst must have delivered that line to each of them because Houdini doesn’t remember telling Adelaide about their conversation on the day of his release.

“As long as those ‘impossible things’ are still somehow able to be logically explained,” Holst says. “And the ones who try to debunk it are crazy. Nobody listens to them.” There’s a brief silence and Holst crosses her arms, puts one leg over the other and lifts her fingers away from where they rest in the crook of her elbow. “Anything else you want to know? Or was that it?”

“Why’d you kill them?” Doyle asks.

“Who?” Holst shoots back. “I’ve killed a lot of people since I sent you off on that shuttle.”

“The sludge. When you said you went to look for them… We— _I_ thought you were just going to observe. To study. Try to talk to them,” Doyle says. He’s asking for Six, to give him the explanation that they had promised it after they were forced to listen to the sludge die in the explosion and, despite the fact that Houdini was interested in knowing, he also wasn’t sure it mattered anymore. Six looked just a few minutes from being done for good and it didn’t even seem completely aware of what was happening. Holst snorts at Doyle.

“They wanted to attack Earth,” Holst says, her tone filled with incredulity, as if she couldn’t understand how they could be so stupid not the get that. “Could you imagine thousands… _millions_ of Seven-Two-Eights showing up here? Taking over the bodies of our people? Government figures? People in power! The _military_.”

“They just want to learn,” Doyle says.

“Learn what? Our weaknesses? How to kill us? Maybe not. Maybe they just wanted to turn us into puppets to make nice. Better safe than sorry, my superiors thought. I agreed. We all did. Most of us did,” Holst says, glancing at Six, who was swaying slightly on its feet.

“Why kill us, too, then?” Adelaide asks next.

“You won’t believe me but I didn’t want to. My superiors… they didn’t even want to let you go from the building. But I convinced them. I said you had signed the papers. It would be fine. It was, for about a week. But they were paranoid. Thought you would talk. And then the _Ragazzino_ was attacked and they sent that message asking for Mister Doyle there… Well, they lost it. We were going to send you up there anyway, set the bomb off once everything was checked out, but you were supposed to come back. But oh, no. Change of plans. Leave them there,” Holst explains.

“And you just agreed? You went along with it?” Adelaide asks.

“At best, I’d be fired if I didn’t. Besides, I wasn’t all that particularly attached. And they had a point. Calling for your friend? Bad news. You all could have been infected. Better safe than sorry,” she repeats. “Kirby was collateral damage. He betrayed us anyway by telling you about the rest of that message from the Seven-Two-Eight.” She stares at him, eyes suddenly narrowing and she leans forward slightly, bites the inside of her mouth. “He’s not breathing. How is he still standing there if he’s not—” She pauses, her eyes widening again just a bit and she looks at Houdini. “There’s a Seven-Two-Eight in there. He’s sludge. Is that how you got off the _Ragazzino_? The _sludge_ helped you?” It’s the first time they’ve heard her use the term that they had been this entire time and she looks disgusted. “You’ve made _friends_ with it?”

“Shut up,” Houdini hears himself say, points aggressively in her direction and she actually complies. “The man who you told everyone was me, the body you used when you said I died in that warehouse,” Houdini asks after a minute of quiet. “Who was he?”

“Do you really care,” Holst answers his question with one of her own, “Or have you already run out of interesting things to ask me?”

“That sample of the sludge in the pill bottle that you took from the ship,” Adelaide says, changing the subject as the thought comes to her. “What happened to it?” Holst doesn’t say anything for a moment, eyes darting towards a spot on the floor as she thinks.

“Our scientists researched it, as far as I know. And then it was destroyed.”

“What did you learn about it?” Doyle asks.

“Surprisingly very little,” Holst says. “Or a lot. I can’t remember. Not exactly my area.” She exhales slowly and checks a watch wrapped securely around her wrist. “Well, this was nice but I think we’re done.”

“You do? What makes you think that?” Houdini snorts. It didn’t sound like anyone was coming for her. The alarm had even been turned off at some point and the hallway outside the closed door wasn’t echoing with the heavy footsteps of a cavalry coming to her rescue.

“I was stalling. Did you really think in any other circumstance I would _honestly_ let you do this to me? That I would just willingly spill all my little secrets to you? I tried to tell you earlier but you zapped me. If I don’t check in every five minutes, I will be assumed dead or compromised and the building will be declared compromised as well. It’s called Clean Slate. The facility will be destroyed with everyone still inside. There’s an hour window for me to make a call to stop it. That hour will be up in…” She glances at her watch again. “Fifteen minutes and thirty seconds.” _What the hell was it with this organization and explosives_ , Houdini thinks. This was the second time in six days that they’ve had to escape from somewhere that was going to blow up. Houdini goes to the desk, picks up the phone that Holst had left behind and tosses it to her.

“Make the call, then.”

“You see, I actually don’t think I will,” Holst says, dropping the phone on the floor, smiling lightly at their startled, nervous faces. “I was given an order. An objective: kill you. I have never failed a mission before in my career. I don’t plan to start now. Besides, they’d lock me up or kill me anyway for letting this all go so wrong. I’d rather die right here, like this. Clean Slate agents are given posthumous medals. I’ve always wanted a medal.”

“You’re just going to have to fail your mission, then,” Houdini says, “Because we’re leaving.”

“You really think they’ll let you leave?” Holst asks as they start to go for the door and they hesitate. “You’re still the enemy. They’ll still try to stop you.”

“Fine,” Houdini says. “Let them try.” And they walk out to an empty hallway, locking the door behind them.

 

. . . .

 

The elevator still works and they take it down to the lobby, all of them silent but, right before it reaches the final floor, Adelaide pulls the emergency brake and the elevator lurches to a halt.

“Whatever’s waiting for us out there…” Adelaide says. “If we don’t make it…” She swallows. “It has been an honor.”

“Come on,” Houdini says. “Don’t talk like that.”

“Harry,” Adelaide says. “Please.” Her eyes are scared, pleading and he deflates, reaches down to grasp her fingers, squeezing them for a few seconds and she presses her thumb against his before letting go.

“You know,” Doyle says, puts a hand on each of Houdini and Adelaide’s shoulders, “I spent all this time trying to find a way to die but now that it’s a very real possibility, I find myself desperately hoping that I live.” He smiles sadly. “Despite what we’ve been through, I’m glad we met.” Adelaide pulls her other arm across her chest, puts her hand over the one on her shoulder and they all stare at one another, saying nothing for a few seconds. “And I’m sorry,” Doyle says, dropping his hand to turn towards Six, speaking to it even though it couldn’t hear him but Six stares intently at him all the same. “It seems I can’t follow through on my end of our deal.” He lifts his hand and Six stares at it before lifting its own and putting it in Doyle’s, shaking it only once.

“Guess there’s no better time than now for these,” Houdini says, pulling the three tiny bottles of alcohol he still had in his pockets, handing one to Doyle, one to Adelaide and keeping the last for himself, twisting the cap off with a faint crack. He holds the bottle up and the other two hesitate before opening their own and they tap them together silently before swigging the clear, harsh liquid down and dropping the bottles to the floor.

“Alright then,” Adelaide says, inhales, exhales, and turns off the brake. The lights flicker and the doors open and they peer around them to see the expansive lobby a few feet away filled with guards. None of them seemed to have noticed yet that there was company but they definitely would as soon as any of them stepped out onto the shiny tile floor. “If one of us distracts them,” Adelaide whispers, holds the button to keep the doors wide open, “The others might be able to run for the doors.”

“I’ll do it,” Houdini says. His mother was safe (or so he made himself believe) and the world already thought he was dead. He got the answers he ached for and that was enough. He could do this for them. He goes to take a step forward but a hand is on his shoulder, holding him back and he turns to see, not Doyle or Adelaide, but Six standing behind him.

“Dead. Anyway,” Six says. “No. Ship. No Home.” It clicks, awkwardly wipes pink foam and saliva from its mouth, looks to each of them. “Not. Monsters,” it says. “Humans.” It pauses. “Friends.” Six then abruptly goes stumbling and lurching out of the elevator before the others could try and stop it. It trips over its own feet as it shuffles towards the guards, starting to make as much noise as possible. Ten guns turn towards it at once and ten guns fire.

“Run!” Adelaide yells and the three of them make a beeline for the front doors, the guards still distracted, overzealous with their gunfire, but a few finally notice them, start shooting in their direction as well and Houdini hears a shot whizz dangerously close to his head, watches as one slices across Adelaide’s arm. They collide with the glass, burst out on to the vast walkway, keep going towards the iron gates that are still wide open. Doyle lurches forward suddenly, grimaces in pain, slows for a brief moment, but shakes Houdini off when he tries to help him, says between heavy breaths that he was fine. Bradshaw’s car is suddenly pulling up to greet them, tires screeching, Gardner behind the wheel, Houdini’s mother in the passenger seat and Gardner is shouting at them to hurry, stretching an arm to the back door facing them to open it and they throw themselves onto the seats.

Houdini slams the door shut behind him and Gardner starts to drive off but, before he can turn the corner, before they can disappear, Houdini tells him to stop, to wait. He rolls down his window, feels Doyle and Adelaide crawling closer behind him to look, too, and they watch as the building shakes, rumbles, and collapses in on itself in a mass of dust and rubble.

“Now what?” Gardner asks.

“Now we go home,” Houdini says, rolls up the window and sits back down, facing forward. Gardner nods and continues driving until they find an exit, the vehicle joining with the rest of the faceless crowd, black smoke rising over the trees behind them.


	2. Epilogue

It was a hoax, Houdini confirms to Taliyah Albero when he’s interviewed on her show a week after the facility collapsed, when he finally decided to show his face again. During that week, though—as the four of them recovered together in Doyle’s house—Houdini had considered staying dead, had asked if there were any homes available in the area. He could send his mother out for errands and spend the rest of his life hiding, no more responsibilities, nothing to worry about.

But that wasn’t really who he was. It never would be. So he drove into the city, walked into a restaurant and tried to get a table. People called him a genius, called him names, said he was cruel, that pretending to be dead wasn’t magic, it was just something really shitty to do. Houdini doesn’t disagree.

 

. . . .

 

They don’t hear anything about the building collapse but none of them are surprised.

There are breaking news reports on every channel about a cargo ship called the _Pelican_ exploding in a so-called “terrorist attack”.

No survivors.

Captain Bradshaw’s face is shown on nearly every screen. Doyle unplugs the television, turns off their internet.

It wasn’t their fault, Houdini reminds them, reminds himself. It wasn’t their fault.

_It wasn’t their fault._

 

. . . .

 

“You’re late,” Nan says, opening the front door to Doyle’s house, staring blankly at Houdini as he stands on the doorstep, a bottle of wine cradled in his arm.

“Come on,” Houdini scoffs. “I’m _not_ late.”

“Everyone else is already here. They have been for exactly thirty minutes,” Nan says, but steps aside to let him in and he walks into the foyer, stops to wait for Nan to close the door and catch up to him. “Therefore, I believe I can say you are late.”

“Fine,” Houdini concedes. “I’m late. Happy?”

“Occasionally,” Nan says. “More so that the children are back.” She lifts an arm towards the living room. “They are all in there,” she says, although Houdini can clearly see them. He bows slightly, walks into the room, clears his throat, and Doyle’s children rush him, demand he shows them another trick.

“Can you make _that_ disappear now?” Kingsley asks, points to a garish bird statue on the mantle that Houdini didn’t remember seeing the last time he was here.

“Gladly,” Houdini says as Doyle walks over, shaking his head. He accepts the bottle, smiling.

“Please don’t,” Doyle says. “You keep making my things vanish but you haven’t returned a single one yet.”

“I didn’t? Hasn’t anybody checked the upstairs closet yet?” Houdini asks and Kingsley and Mary look at each other with excitement before dashing off, their shoes clumping on the staircase.

“You’re good with kids,” Gardner says from where he’s standing by the couch.

“That’s because,” Adelaide says, “He is one.”

“Hey,” Houdini says, “If I wanted to be insulted, I could just search for my name online.”

“Are people still mad about your death hoax?” Adelaide asks.

“It’s been a year,” Houdini says. “You’d think they’d be over it by now.”

 

. . . .

 

“So,” Doyle looks to Gardner as they stand around one side of the kitchen island, Nan on the other by the stove and counters making dinner, “How long are you here for?”

“Couple days and then I’m due on the _Adjutant_ before it leaves. I want to stay longer but their engine is seriously on the fritz and they want to get out of here on schedule. Then Frontier Works is shipping me to the _Whalehead_ to fix… I don’t even remember. I’m fixing something,” Gardner laughs, takes a sip of his drink. When he had finally shown his face, Gardner had expected to be accused of being the one responsible for  blowing up the _Pelican_ , considering how he was the only crew member to not be on board when it was destroyed ( _I’m the man who was the only survivor of what they’re calling a terrorist attack_ , Gardner had said, _I’ll be surprised if prison is the least of my problems_ ) but the authorities claimed they already knew who had done it and showed him a photo of the engineer, Pollard. They had taken a look at the employees on board the ship and they’d recognized him immediately. ( _He’s been on our Watch List for ten years_ , they had said. _He’s responsible for blowing up the Ellis-Watts Building_. _Disappeared off the map. Guess he decided return. Really wish this wasn’t how he decided to go out._ ) Once he was proven innocent, Frontier Works had hired him back, but Gardner had said he had enough of space travel to last a lifetime, got a job repairing cargo ships, fitting them all with the long distance phone he had designed. Besides, Gardner had said grimly, he had a lot of funerals to attend.

“Well,” Adelaide says, “It’s good you could make it today.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Gardner says.

“Would you all please leave?” Nan asks as she chops vegetables. “I’m trying to work.”

 

. . . .

 

Seated around one end of the massive dining room table, the four of them—the kids allowed to eat in the living room for one night, a special treat to give the grown-ups some time to themselves—lift their glasses of wine before starting to eat.

“To Captain Bradshaw,” Gardner says. “And the rest of the crew of the _Pelican_.”

“And to Six,” Doyle says. “Wherever it is.”

They clink their glasses.

 

. . . .

 

Nan tries to clear the table but Doyle stops her, says he can handle it if she would get the children to bed instead and he picks up their plates, carrying them towards the kitchen. Houdini collects the glasses—Adelaide and Gardner busy, deep in conversation—and follows Doyle, hesitates in the doorway when he sees him standing over the sink, using a napkin to blot at the space just under his nose.

“Everything alright?” Houdini asks and Doyle jumps, turns around, quickly stuffs the napkin into the pocket of his jacket.

“Yes,” Doyle says. “Of course. Just a bit of a runny nose. I think Mary must have picked up a cold at school and passed it on to me.”

“Right,” Houdini says. “Sure.”

“I’ll just get the rest of the dishes,” Doyle says, brushing past Houdini to head back to the dining room. Houdini puts the glasses down carefully on the marble counter and unfurls his hand, revealing the napkin that he had lifted from Doyle as he walked by, holds it closer to the light and stares at the slowly drying black splotches that had been left behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just like last time, I find myself, surprisingly, with not much to say.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who loved the first fic and I hope at least a couple of you were satisfied with this one as well. I’m about 90% sure that I won’t be writing anything else for this AU. I had a great time working on this series but, at the very least, I need a bit of a break.
> 
> Some more songs for you! 
> 
> [“Down the Line” - Jose Gonzalez.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbBIhiweYDE)   
>  [“Murmur” - Daniel Law Heath.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HCbwMHZSKE)   
>  [“Greeting The Menace (Instrumental)” - Zack Hemsey.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xfn3l8xZYw)   
>  [“Violence and Variations” - Bear McCreary.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYwpt092O7U)
> 
> As always, I’m on tumblr! [@kenlubin](http://kenlubin.tumblr.com/), if you have any questions or want to chat.


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